Detours

Stories in “Detours”.

• On the map. Not in the sea.Phantom islands appeared in charts or reports but were later found not to exist. Misidentification and errors…
• Learn a word yesterday. See it everywhere today.Frequency illusion is the sense that something newly noticed is suddenly appearing often. Selective attention…
• The next round uses a different kind of defence.Chess boxing alternates rounds of chess and boxing. The same contest asks competitors to handle both the boar…
• All that adventure. To iron a shirt.Extreme ironing takes an ironing board to unusual or challenging locations and combines an outdoor adventure…
• An obstacle race, with another person on board.Wife-carrying is a sport associated with Finland in which a competitor carries a partner through an obstacle…
• A cheese rolls downhill. People follow.At Cooper’s Hill in England, competitors race down a steep slope after a wheel of cheese. Falls and injuries…
• A snorkel trip without the tropical sea.Bog snorkelling races competitors through a water-filled trench in a Welsh peat bog. Flippers are used, while…
• A festival float that makes visitors look twice.Kawasaki’s Kanamara Matsuri is known for phallic portable shrines. Behind their striking appearance are tradi…
• At this event, a crying baby is part of the plan.Japanese crying-baby sumo festivals connect a baby’s cries with wishes for healthy growth. Babies are held by…
• A nativity scene, with someone answering nature’s call.Catalan and some neighbouring nativity traditions include a caganer: a small figure depicted defecating. Sacr…
• Pay for two coffees. Drink one.The Neapolitan caffè sospeso tradition leaves a prepaid coffee for someone who needs it later. The giver does…
• A finished book gets another journey.BookCrossing lets readers register books and pass them on or leave them for others to find. Their travels can…
• Your ordinary street may hide a treasure hunt.Geocaching uses coordinates to guide players to hidden containers. Finders usually record their visit and put…
• The treasure is a stamp in your notebook.Letterboxing follows clues to hidden boxes. Participants often stamp their own notebook with the box’s rubber…
• Money that will not fit in a wallet.Yap’s rai stones include large stone discs with a hole through the centre. Some are far removed from the pock…
• A record made of cords and knots.Andean quipus recorded information with cords and knots. Used in Inca administration and other contexts, they…
• A conversation carried by whistling.Whistled languages encode features of spoken language in whistles. Some are used to communicate across distan…
• A roll of snow, with no person behind it.Snow rollers form naturally when conditions allow wind or other forces to roll snow into cylindrical shapes.…
• A pile of stones can carry a message.Arctic inuksuit are stone structures that can mark routes or places and serve other purposes. They do not all…
• A repair that leaves the break visible.Kintsugi repairs ceramics with lacquer and finishes joins with metallic powder. The damaged areas become visi…
• A little luck, baked into a waffle.Lukken are thin waffles from West Flanders. Their name comes from the Dutch word for luck. Children tradition…
• The coin-shaped bread got the central bank's attention.South Korea's 10 won bread is a cheese-filled snack shaped like a coin. The Bank of Korea once asked sellers…
• Nekomata Station has a cat assistant.At Japan's Nekomata Station, the name includes the word for cat. After the station opened to general passenge…
• From “load a gun” to “invite to a birthday.”In Wangerooge Frisian, onlidder once meant “to load,” as with a ship or gun. Contact with German appears to h…
• The stationmaster is a rescued cat.Mikan, a cat taken in at a Kaohsiung Metro station in Taiwan, was named stationmaster in 2020. The cat became…
• One country once drank more tea than Britain.New Zealand once consumed more tea per person than Britain. Around the 1980s, coffee began overtaking tea the…
• An apple-cat mascot plays metal drums.Nyango Star, a mascot from Kuroishi in Japan's Aomori Prefecture, combines an apple and a cat. Its anonymous…
• An organ console went to the wrong theater.A pipe-organ console intended for Loew's Jersey Theatre was first installed at the Paradise Theatre by mistak…
• No hiragana allowed. Only kanji posts.Japan's joke social app Tsuita allows users to post only kanji characters. Without the usual Japanese syllaba…
• A German cake became an internet in-joke.Black Forest gateau, the chocolate-and-cherry cake, appeared in the 2007 game Portal. Its role in the game he…
• Sweden's first woman bus driver was called “Buss-Berta.”Berta Persson drove the Kappelshamn–Visby route from 1927 to 1934. As Sweden's first female bus driver, she e…
• Before the music venue, there was a hot-dog factory.Brooklyn music venue Baby's All Right opened in 2013 inside a former production facility of the historic hot-…
• He wrote their hit. He joined the band 30 years later.Jim Photoglo co-wrote “Fishin' in the Dark,” a hit for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in the 1980s. He joined the…
• A fictional toaster inventor reached a banknote list.Students invented the toaster pioneer Alan MacMasters in a Wikipedia hoax. The false story spread so far that…
• Beavers, Mario games and Jackie Chan.The slapstick film Hundreds of Beavers drew ideas from Mario games as well as silent comedy. Its lead perform…
• A Japanese song went viral abroad, then back home.Cinnamons and Evening Cinema released “Summertime” in 2017. It caught on in Southeast Asia in 2019, then spre…
• The Odyssey, arranged like game levels.The album musical Epic retells Homer's Odyssey in nine sagas. Its creator drew on video-game structure: each…
• A game for non-gamers helped shape visual novels.Koichi Nakamura wanted Otogirisō to appeal to people unfamiliar with games. Players read the story and choose…
• A 3D Celeste game was made in one week.Celeste 64 was developed during a week-long game jam to mark the original game's sixth anniversary. Members o…
• Phone puzzles in the Imperial Palace gardens.QuizKnock collaborated with Japan's Imperial Household Agency on smartphone puzzles for the Imperial Palace E…
• A joke during online poker became a TV series.During a 2020 online poker game, director Jeff Baena joked about re-dubbing old films. He began taking the id…
• Run a subway station. Empty the bins yourself.Overcrowd asks players to build platforms and gates, but also to manage heat, hunger, and cleanliness. Even e…
• “Release the game!” “Give us 10 to 20 minutes.”When a Steam user pushed for Door Kickers 2's release, a developer replied that it would take 10 to 20 minute…
• Hit the hippo; the ducks stay safe.In Ducks Ahoy!, the hippo knocks the gondola back but does not hurt the ducks. Its creators deliberately avoi…
• Farm, fish, mine— and marry the town leader.Sun Haven mixes farming, fishing, mining, and romance. Among its marriage candidates is Lucia, the leader of…
• A Pizza Hut–Taco Bell song met an ancient Roman rhetorician.The 2008 Das Racist song has two people repeatedly trying to find each other at a combined Pizza Hut and Taco…
• A farm store began teaching people how to raise chickens.As cities in the U.S. Northwest allowed more urban chicken keeping, Coastal Farm & Ranch held seminars for su…
• A little mountain. One chicken on top.Artist Simeon Barclay made a work with a chicken perched on a small mound of stones. A critic read it as an o…
• The audience picked how the opera would unfold.In a 2015 Danish production of Mozart's Così fan tutte, director Annilese Miskimmon let the audience select b…
• A different character. The same actor again.In the 2024 Doctor Who series, Susan Twist appeared as seemingly unrelated characters across the first six ep…
• A children's book looked at hardship too.Ye Shengtao's The Scarecrow, published in China in 1923, collected 23 fairy tales. Alongside childhood wonder…
• Fifty hours of cartoons. Fourteen old films. Repeat.In the early 1980s, Rhode Island station WSTG stayed on the air while its owner sought a buyer by rerunning 5…
• An Alaska TV newsroom once used home-movie cameras.Anchorage station KIMO once shot its newsfilm on home-movie cameras. It later overhauled its news operation a…
• A TV romance event sparked 40.7 million hashtag uses.During the Philippine TV event Tamang Panahon, its associated hashtag appeared 40,706,392 times on Twitter in…
• The American-sounding song was Brazilian. The Brazilian song was American.On his 2004 English-language album, Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso recorded both Feelings and Carioca. The…
• Critics said his shows were too theatrical. Then his quiet show was too safe.Alexander McQueen had long been criticized for letting runway spectacle overshadow the clothes. At his restra…
• Marmalade, meal names, fish knives. All became class clues in a satire.Jilly Cooper's 1979 book Class satirised British social rank through fictional caricatures. A later food hist…
• The film's rough waves? White fabric and plastic bags.The 2021 film A New Old Play follows a Sichuan opera actor's life. Director Qiu Jiongjiong deliberately used…
• Generations of rulers in one painting. A few years later, the kingdom fell.The House of Bijapur, painted around 1680, gathered the dynasty's rulers in one image. The Bijapur sultanate…
• Japan's first female college graduate. Her great-granddaughter wrote the biography.Ōyama Sutematsu graduated from Vassar after studying in the United States in the 19th century. Her great-gran…
• Cotton-tree flowers kept drifting in. They were not in the script.While the Hong Kong film Papa was being shot, cotton trees were in bloom. Director Philip Yung said the falli…
• Pre-production began with no director. The lead actor stepped forward.The 1924 Polish Yiddish silent film Tkies-kaf entered pre-production without a director. Lead actor Zygmunt T…
• BBC One turned down the drama. Years later, it became a BBC One hit.Jed Mercurio pitched Line of Duty to BBC One in 2011 but was directed to BBC Two, where it began in 2012. Aft…
• The actor knew sign language. Her character was a beginner.Actor Chung Suet Ying had learned sign language for family reasons before appearing in the Hong Kong film The…
• The director dubbed the actor's lines. The actor asked for a role in his next feature.Jean-Paul Belmondo could not dub his lines for Godard's short film Charlotte and Her Boyfriend because he was…
• Born in the U.S.A. became the first commercial CD made in the US.Bruce Springsteen's 1984 album was the first compact disc manufactured in the United States for commercial re…
• That green Windows XP hill was only briefly so bare.The Bliss wallpaper was photographed in California in 1996 after vineyards had been cleared following a phyll…
• The Hangover hung in a Paris club. Van Gogh wondered if it was finished.Toulouse-Lautrec's painting of Suzanne Valadon was among the works permanently displayed at Le Mirliton night…
• Viewers imagined them as a couple. The writers took notice.The 2022 Doctor Who specials explored a possible romance between the Thirteenth Doctor and Yaz. Producers sai…
• He became a successful actor. His high-school diploma came at 34.Jeremy Allen White studied ballet, jazz and tap dance as a child before pursuing acting. He often missed afte…
• Dragon Ball Super ended. Fans across Latin America watched together.Public screenings of the 2018 Dragon Ball Super finale drew crowds across Latin America, including stadiums t…
• Almost no budget. One hotel room. Seven days of recording.My Chemical Romance recorded and produced its 2002 debut album I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your…
• A spider bite appeared on an actor's face. Editors removed it from the scene.For the television episode Future Days of The Last of Us, a spider bite on Kaitlyn Dever's face was digitally…
• In Windsor, Canada, pizza toppings start with a different cut.Windsor-style pizza spreads shredded pepperoni across the pie so its flavour reaches every bite and grease do…
• Her only album made little noise in 1982. Decades later, listeners found it.Takako Mamiya released just one album, Love Trip. It attracted little mainstream attention at first, but the…
• The composer paced around his home, repeating the same phrase in new rhythms.For the 2024 anime theme Shikairo Days, composer Yūki Waga said he walked around his home repeating its signa…
• Someone found an old EP in a charity shop. The band reunited two decades later.British band Panchiko split up around 2000. After a copy of their early EP was discovered in a charity shop a…
• Frank Ocean sang on stage. Brad Pitt acted out a phone call nearby.At a US music festival in 2017, Frank Ocean performed Close to You while actor Brad Pitt, seated offstage, ac…
• Scrat was meant to die early. The trailer changed his fate.The acorn-chasing Scrat was initially set to be killed in the opening of Ice Age. Audiences responded well to…
• She unveiled a virtual persona. The screen was an old CRT television.At her final Dempagumi.inc appearance in April 2022, Japanese performer Nagi Nemoto revealed her VTuber perso…
• To save the Pokémon, you have to brush your own teeth.Released in 2020, Pokémon Smile uses a phone camera to turn toothbrushing into a game. On screen, bacteria ho…
• A dog retrieved baseball bats. A camera rode on his back.Ripken the Labrador collected discarded bats during US baseball games. A GoPro mounted on his back filmed his…
• A Japanese manga became a Japanese drama. Its first audience was in Taiwan.The live-action adaptation of Accomplishment of Fudanshi Bartender was produced in Japan but premiered on Tai…
• The players wore 70, 73 and 77. Their line got a TV-show nickname.Los Angeles Kings forwards Tanner Pearson, Tyler Toffoli and Jeff Carter all wore numbers in the 70s. Their 2…
• A Baltimore Christmas wish: crabs. It became a local song.David DeBoy recorded the humorous Crabs for Christmas in 1980, building the song around Baltimore's local fla…
• To make a chariot-racing game, he studied 43 ancient arenas.Spanish developer Daniel Lopez Soria drew inspiration from a 1979 board game for Qvadriga, released in 2014.…
• Five members in one boy band. Two came from North Korea.South Korean group 1Verse debuted in July 2025. Members Hyuk and Seok are North Korean defectors, making it t…
• He copied a trick with limbs. His own leg was really cut off.In the Ming-era fantasy novel Journey to the South, arhats pretend to sever their limbs to trick the hero Hua…
• You visit two friends in a game. Soon they ask you to fix their marriage.In the 2005 interactive drama Façade, players type freely to speak with Grace and Trip. Their conversation tu…
• Tea comes with novvot. The name changes across regions.Novvot is a traditional sugar confection enjoyed in Central Asia and nearby regions; in Iran, nabat is a comm…
• A villain arrived in 1975. The same voice returned in 2024.Doctor Who introduced Sutekh in the 1975 serial Pyramids of Mars. The villain returned in a 2024 two-part sto…
• A cozy game took years to make. The label began to grate on its director.Development of Wanderstop began around 2018. Director Davey Wreden joked it took so long that cozy game had b…
• SZA named a song after Scorsese. A day later, he heard it.SZA released 'Scorsese Baby Daddy' on 20 December 2024. The next day, Martin Scorsese's daughter played it fo…
• Episode 8055: all women on screen, and behind it too.For International Women's Day in 2019, Australian soap Neighbours aired an episode with an all-female cast. W…
• Design a giant robot. Print it in 34 parts.For a 2025 Doctor Who episode, the larger robot costumes were digitally designed, divided into 34 pieces for…
• Taylor Swift released 'Fortnight'. Americans looked up the word.'Fortnight' means two weeks. On the day Taylor Swift released a song with that title, US Google searches for…
• A joke about his family? They get a say first.American comedian Dustin Nickerson often jokes about parenting and marriage. He says his family members can v…
• No studio. Too much outside noise. The singer went under a blanket.Filipino singer TJ Monterde recorded his 2020 song 'Puhon' in his bedroom. To reduce outside noise, he sang b…
• The characters communicate by whistling. The show consulted the game's sound crew.In season two of The Last of Us, the Seraphites use a whistled language. For episode five, the television tea…
• Record a song in a rented house. Shoot the video that same day.Musicians Glaive and Ericdoa recorded 'Cloak n Dagger' in one day at a short-term rental in North Carolina in…
• He watched anime on American TV. Then helped build a studio in Japan.The US technology channel TechTV aired an anime block called Anime Unleashed. Arthell Isom, later a co-founde…
• Two drum kits. Two basses. First, the producer needed lessons.Jorge Ben's 1976 Brazilian album África Brasil used an unusually large lineup, including two drum kits and tw…
• He thought it was This Is Us. It was The Last of Us.When actor Joe Pantoliano heard about a role in The Last of Us, he initially thought it was for This Is Us, a…
• The title means 'chalice'. It sounds like 'shut up'.Brazilian song 'Cálice' used the similarity between the Portuguese words for 'chalice' and 'be quiet' to crit…
• Build a village on a giant creature. Then choose to feed it your villagers.Swiss-developed game The Wandering Village puts a settlement on the back of a huge creature. A community vote…
• Need help? Summon an armadillo. Or an eagle. Or a chimpanzee.In the 1991 game Danan: The Jungle Fighter, collecting animal symbols lets the player summon one of three cre…
• A new game's announcement date. Printed on a pizza receipt.In 2022, Activision sent influencers pizza boxes with receipts attached. A message at the bottom teased a Dec…
• The song was recorded. The borrowed music was not cleared.Frank Ocean's 2011 track 'American Wedding' used the instrumental from the Eagles' 'Hotel California'. After…
• The club needed a band name. A TV cartoon supplied one.A Nashville country band needed a name so a club could advertise its show. Singer Michael Reynolds chose Pinm…
• The song won Iceland's selection. Their outfits sold out too.Icelandic duo Væb won the country's 2025 Eurovision selection. They later released Ash Wednesday costumes bas…
• A song caught on through TikTok. Then it topped a national chart.Filipino group Bini released 'Pantropiko' in 2023. It later spread on TikTok and reached number one on Billbo…
• A portrait of Toulouse-Lautrec. He is cooking in a kitchen.Édouard Vuillard's 1898 painting shows fellow artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec cooking lobster at a country h…
• Two brothers founded a film studio. The younger brother and his partner starred.Shanghai's Huaju Film Company was founded in 1925 by brothers Zhang Qingpu and Zhang Huimin. Many of its film…
• The singer was performing in Italy. 'She' was also appearing in Germany.After Haiducii's cover of 'Dragostea din tei' became popular, impersonators lip-synced at several booked appe…
• School was out. The brothers went to a producer's house.The Lemon Twigs reached producer Jonathan Rado after sending demos online. Still in high school, the brothers…
• A new episode each week. One story across the whole season.Doctor Who's thirteenth series, aired in 2021, used all six episodes for one story called Flux. It was the fi…
• The studio was called Wixel. It meant 'weird pixel'.Lebanese game designer Reine Abbas co-founded Wixel Studios in 2008. The name shortened 'weird pixel', reflec…
• Cannes gave it a mixed reception. Decades later, opinion shifted.Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me drew a polarized reaction at Cannes in 1992; contemporary reports described bot…
• Recording began in a basement. The album arrived over a decade later.Rapper Boldy James and producer Sterling Toles began recording Manger on McNichols in a Detroit basement betw…
• How did the band describe itself? Five people with a 'tofu mentality'.Japanese band Gohobi was formed around the idea of making listeners feel at home. Early on, the members also…
• It is not a film about dolls. Yet critics compared it with Barbie.The 2024 Chinese comedy-drama Her Story follows a single mother and her female neighbor. Its focus on women's…
• The person behind the song left a message. It ended up on the debut single.US band Honey Revenge released its debut single Miss Me in 2021. Singer Devin Papadol had written it years ea…
• They wanted greener music streaming. So fans danced in Seoul.Climate group Kpop4planet pressed music platforms to switch to renewable power. In February 2023 it held a da…
• One artist, two unexpected canvases: a skateboard and a team shirt.Qatari calligrapher Fatma Al Sharshani received two Paris Saint-Germain commissions: a skateboard design in 2…
• An opera singer needed tuition. A Kodak jingle helped pay it.American composer and soprano Susan Botti took commercial work on Kodak's 1988 Olympic 'True Colors' jingle t…
• He heard sounds while asleep. Then tried to rebuild them awake.Aphex Twin said lucid dreaming inspired his 1994 album Selected Ambient Works Volume II. He described waking…
• Her 1980s records were not hits. Decades later, listeners found them.Tomoko Aran released nine albums between 1981 and 1990, without major hits under her own name at the time. In…
• The manga journey was fiction. Its travel times came from Google Maps.Manga creator Maki Marukido said in a 2022 interview that she checked travel times on Google Maps while writi…
• The Wizard of Oz opened in 1939. Its original film soundtrack arrived in 1956.The soundtrack using recordings from the film came out in 1956, around the movie's television premiere. Other…
• A bag meant to reduce waste became something people collect.Baggu launched reusable bags in the US in 2007. Limited designs and collaborations later attracted collectors…
• A Doctor Who story set at Partition changed even the closing theme.The 2018 episode Demons of the Punjab takes place around the 1947 Partition of India. Its score uses instrume…
• He had not dated anyone, so he listened to couples for a love song.Conan Gray said the idea for his 2021 song People Watching came from overhearing couples and wishing to share…
• Commissioned for pineapple juice ads, O'Keeffe first painted a flower and papaya.In 1939 Georgia O'Keeffe made Hawaii paintings for Dole pineapple juice advertising. Her first submissions sh…
• She cut up leggings for comfort. A WNBA style followed.In 2018, A'ja Wilson wanted to keep a sore leg warm but found full leggings restrictive. She cut a pair to co…
• A jazz arrangement of a Kirby game tune won a Grammy.The US-based 8-Bit Big Band rearranges video game music for jazz orchestra. Its version of Meta Knight's Reve…
• His name is Huwie. People still asked him to write his real name.Japanese singer and actor Huwie Ishizaki said people often doubted the unusual given name he wrote down and a…
• SpongeBob's creators wanted a theme loud enough to annoy sleeping parents.The SpongeBob SquarePants theme adapts an old sea-shanty melody. Creative director Derek Drymon later recalle…
• Two grandsons shared their grandfathers' names—and formed the same kind of duo.The Mexican norteño duo Carlos y José formed in 1968. In 2015, grandsons Juan Carlos Tierranegra and José Edw…
• At a New Zealand pool complex, the slides took inspiration from eels.The hydroslides at Christchurch's Parakiore Recreation and Sport Centre were designed to resemble eels in an…
• Sakura Miko turned up in a paper on stability and thermodynamics.The Japanese VTuber Sakura Miko was used as an example in a 2024 paper titled 'Structural stability and therm…
• The Finnish film brought part of its subject to its Rome premiere.For the 2024 Rome screening of 100 Litres of Gold, filmmakers shipped 20 litres of unfermented sahti to Italy…
• A modest home stood among Manhattan towers and drew a huge crowd.America's Little House opened on Park Avenue in 1934 as a model home, complete with a lawn and white fence. S…
• A Sanrio publication let its characters talk about real conflicts.A 2015 issue of the Strawberry Newspaper carried a pacifist message for the 70th anniversary of Japan's surre…
• Two nuthatch species gave an ornithologist a literary pun.Robert Allen Norris compared two nuthatches for his 1954 doctoral dissertation: Sitta pusilla and Sitta pygma…
• A lawyer began filming communication tips inside a parked pickup truck.In 2022, Texas lawyer Jefferson Fisher recorded short videos in his truck in Silsbee. A TikTok on how to argu…
• A color film reached its first audiences without its colors.The 1982 Albanian film The Second November was shot on color stock, but a shortage of processing chemicals me…
• To follow an Edison biography, a reviewer started at its last chapter.Edmund Morris's 2019 biography Edison runs from the inventor's death back to his birth. NPR's Scott Detrow fo…
• The actor playing a clockmaker went to learn the craft himself.Ben Ahlers plays clockmaker Jack Trotter in The Gilded Age. For the show's second season, he took watchmaking…
• A brass group changed a trombone's sound with folded foil.The Westerlies, a U.S. ensemble of two trumpets and two trombones, has experimented by folding tin foil acros…
• A television opening scene needed quite a crowd of unpredictable performers.The forest opening of the 2025 Doctor Who episode Wish World used an owl, six ducks, a horse and a baby. Inse…
• How many times does one rock song say 'Na'?A Rock Sound writer counted 261 instances of 'Na' in My Chemical Romance's song Na Na Na. The repetition itse…
• The route takes shape only after passengers book a ride.Victoria, Australia's FlexiRide buses operate within designated service areas rather than along fixed routes.…
• The artist built a strange creature—and wrote a fake scholarly report about it.In 1959, Remedios Varo made Homo rodans from discarded animal bones: an imagined human precursor with a wheel…
• A pianist's arm pain led her to a smaller instrument and a new musical path.After tendinopathy made both her arms sore, American pianist Phyllis Chen turned to the toy piano. She founde…
• Australia had a superhero whose mission was encouraging condom use.Condoman was created in 1987 for an HIV-prevention campaign aimed at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Au…
• A cartoon fandom even developed its own names for styles of music.Fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic have made large amounts of music inspired by the show. Community…
• Win this bread contest and supply the French president's residence for a year.Paris has held an annual best-baguette competition since 1994. Eligible loaves are judged on qualities includ…
• No shiny car renderings: the racers are colored dots on a thick track line.The 2024 management game Golden Lap puts players in charge of a 1970s-style Formula One team. Its races repre…
• Nicolas Cage took cooking lessons for a chef role.For the 2021 film Pig, two Portland chefs trained Cage to portray a Portland chef. One was Gabriel Rucker, wh…
• A UFO festival has hosted costume contests for pets.McMinnville, Oregon, began its UFO festival in 2000 around the 50th anniversary of famous 1950 UFO photos. It…
• A naked festival usually still has a loinclothJapan’s hadaka matsuri are festivals in which participants wear very little clothing. A fundoshi loincloth is…
• The ammunition at this carnival is orangesAt the Carnival of Ivrea in northern Italy, organized teams throw oranges at one another. People on foot face…
• A mud festival began with cosmetics marketingSouth Korea’s Boryeong Mud Festival began in 1998. It was conceived partly to promote cosmetics made with loc…
• A village procession with masks and huge bellsBulgarian kukeri traditions feature costumed figures walking and dancing through villages. Elaborate masks an…
• A bun tower race uses plastic bunsHong Kong’s Cheung Chau Bun Festival includes a tower-climbing contest to collect buns. The modern race retur…
• A chicken inside a duck inside a turkeyTurducken puts a deboned chicken inside a deboned duck, then inside a deboned turkey. Its name combines the n…
• A chocolate bar went into the fryerThe deep-fried Mars bar coats a chocolate bar in batter before frying it. Associated with Scottish chip shops…
• Potato chips can be the sandwich fillingA crisp sandwich puts potato chips between slices of bread, often with butter. It is familiar in Britain and…
• French fries take the middle of the sandwichA chip butty is a British sandwich filled with chips, meaning French fries here. Butter and various sauces ma…
• The sandwich filling was a piece of toastA toast sandwich places a thin slice of toasted bread between two other slices of bread. A recipe appeared in…
• A museum for Spam, not unwanted emailAustin, Minnesota has a museum devoted to the canned meat Spam. Exhibits cover the changing cans and the prod…
• A museum for mistakes too interesting to ignoreThe Museum of Bad Art began after a painting was recovered from the trash. It looks for seriously intended or…
• A toilet museum even has poetry about toiletsNew Delhi’s Sulabh International Museum of Toilets presents the history of sanitation. Alongside toilet-relat…
• One kind of anatomical specimen became a museumIceland’s Phallological Museum specializes in specimens of animal penises. Its founder was a teacher, and gif…
• The leftovers of relationships became a museumZagreb’s Museum of Broken Relationships grew from an idea shared by two artists after their relationship ende…
• A building can be designed to annoy the neighborA spite house is built or altered to irritate someone, for example by blocking light or access. Its shape can…
• An earthquake helps explain some of the odd architectureCalifornia’s Winchester Mystery House is known for dead-end stairs and unusual doors. The 1906 earthquake dam…
• A room projects roughly 66 metres with no columns beneath itAt Wisconsin’s House on the Rock, the Infinity Room projects about 66 metres from the main structure without…
• Broken bottles and shells decorate a thirty-metre towerSimon Rodia spent 33 years building the Watts Towers in Los Angeles. Steel and concrete structures are decora…
• Newspapers became walls and furniture in this houseMassachusetts’ Paper House was built in the 1920s. Newspaper panels filled a wooden frame and were left visib…
• Polo and lacrosse meet in one team sportPolocrosse combines elements of polo and lacrosse. Riders carry and pass a ball with a net-headed stick and s…
• The players aim for a goal while riding bicyclesCycle ball resembles football played on bicycles. Teams of two control the ball with the bicycle or the head,…
• Chess can begin with a randomized back rankChess960 randomizes the back-rank pieces subject to rules: bishops occupy opposite-colored squares, and the k…
• In this throwing game, overshooting sends the score to zeroIn South African jukskei, players throw wooden implements at a peg in a sandpit. Knocking it over scores thre…
• The score comes after the ball bounces backIn tchoukball, an attacker throws at a rebound frame and scores when the returning ball lands on the court wi…
• An Irish fair crowns a goat as its kingAt Killorglin’s Puck Fair in Ireland, a goat is crowned King Puck. The animal becomes a symbol of the festivi…
• Two church communities exchange fireworks across the townIn Vrontados on the Greek island of Chios, an Easter tradition has two church communities firing rockets towa…
• The costumes also carry a review of the past yearLa Vijanera in Silió, Spain, features many costumed characters, including figures wearing skins and bells. Al…
• A mock coup comes with flour and eggsIn Ibi, Spain, Els Enfarinats on December 28 involves participants in mock military clothing staging a preten…
• At Haro’s festival, people splash wine on one anotherThe wine festival in Haro, La Rioja, includes a wine battle. Following a mass, participants splash each other…
• The festival guests receive fruit and vegetablesLopburi, Thailand has a Monkey Buffet Festival offering fruit and vegetables to local macaques. The unusual f…
• Another town’s claim helped inspire a garlic festivalGilroy’s Garlic Festival began in California in 1979. Its founder was inspired by a French town’s annual fest…
• The bellybutton dance puts an extra face on the bodyFurano’s Hokkai Heso Matsuri features dancers with faces painted on their stomachs. Established in 1969, the…
• Wet fingers play the rims of rotating bowlsBenjamin Franklin’s glass harmonica mounted glass bowls horizontally on a rotating spindle. The player touche…
• A hand-cranked wheel rubs the stringsA hurdy-gurdy uses a hand-cranked, rosined wheel to rub strings and produce sound. A keyboard changes the pit…
• A wooden seesaw launches the ball for the batterIn the English game bat and trap, a ball rests on a seesaw mechanism in a wooden box. The batter strikes the…
• The cue moves discs instead of rolling ballsNovuss, associated with Latvia and Estonia, is played on a square board with corner pockets. Players use cues…
• Hands replace rackets and a shuttle replaces the ballIndiaca is played across a net using the hands to strike a large feathered shuttle. Its heavier base and feat…
• Three teams share one very large ballKin-Ball originated in Canada and uses a ball about 1.2 metres across. Three teams participate in a match, an…
• A shuttlecock game can rely on feet rather than handsIn Chinese jianzi, players keep a feathered shuttlecock from reaching the ground with body parts other than t…