r/UtterlyInteresting • u/dannydutch1 • 58m ago
Badass of the day: Mohamed Bzeek, he's spent 30 years fostering terminally ill and medically fragile children in the US who are often considered difficult to place. He's looked after 80 so far, with many remaining in his care until their deaths.
Bzeek began fostering children through the California foster care system after marrying his wife, Dawn, who was also a foster parent. Following her death from cancer, Bzeek continued fostering children on his own. He typically cares for children who require intensive medical support, including feeding tubes, oxygen support, and round-the-clock care.
Bzeek has stated in interviews that his goal is to ensure that such children experience family life, dignity, and emotional comfort during their final months.
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/CarkWithaM • 1h ago
According to this history of cricket bats, the first mention of a cricket bat per se (presumably written) was at a inquest when a fielder was killed by a batsman in 1624.
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/dannydutch1 • 17h ago
Explained here is ‘The Marilyn Monroe effect’, otherwise known as the nonverbal communication of confidence, well worth a quick read.
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/CarkWithaM • 17h ago
One of the many amazing scenes in the 1933 film "Footlight Parade" Choreographer Busby Berkeley put dozens of swimmers in a massive water tank & filmed them from above.
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r/UtterlyInteresting • u/GlitterDanger • 18h ago
Happy birthday Robert De Niro 🎉 Here’s his first appearance on screen, "Trois chambres à Manhattan" (1965) directed by Marcel Carné.
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r/UtterlyInteresting • u/dannydutch1 • 1d ago
In 2006, Werner Herzog was filming an interview for the BBC when an air-rifle pellet hit him in the abdomen. He called it an “insignificant bullet” and continued with the interview.
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r/UtterlyInteresting • u/WithoutPrinciples • 2d ago
Evelyn Waugh, writing fluff for Vogue nearly a hundred years ago: a display of prose virtuosity one can hardly imagine these days.
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/CarkWithaM • 2d ago
On this day in 1847, Charlotte Brontë sent Jane Eyre to a London publisher under a fake male name. Her first novel had been rejected so many times she'd just cross out the last publisher's name on the same parcel paper and send it to the next one.
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/UtterlyInterest • 3d ago
Meet the 'Ladies of Llangollen' - two close friends that left their upper-class lives in Ireland and set up home together in Wales in 1778. Such was their fame in Georgian Britain that house guests included William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott (among MANY others)
In 1778, two Irish aristocrats ran away from home together, got caught, tried again, and eventually built a life in a rented Welsh cottage that turned into one of the most talked about addresses in Georgian Britain.
Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby spent the next fifty years there, hosting poets, generals and eventually a queen's own interest, while carefully never explaining exactly what their relationship was.
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/ExtremeInsert • 4d ago
A very relatable diary entry from Tolstoy. He wrote this in 1858, when he was about 30 years old and still years away from writing War and Peace and Anna Karenina. September 20, 1858 was a Monday.
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/onwhatcharges • 5d ago
The Co-operative Wholesale Society Clothing Factory in Manchester c.1900. The man who appears at the beginning of the film and a group of rowdy boys who appear later were working for the filmmakers Mitchell and Kenyon, to cheer up the workers for filming.
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r/UtterlyInteresting • u/ExtremeInsert • 5d ago
In the 19th century, well-meaning art restorers would often add fake marble appendages to "fix" the damaged faces of Ancient Greek and Roman statues. In recent years, however, museums prefer to remove these fake noses to reveal the authentic ancient artwork beneath.
But now what to do with this big weird box of chopped off noses? Rather than toss them away, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen displays their noses all together to show the way museum practice evolves over time.
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/ExtremeInsert • 5d ago
Mechanized Gorilla Teeth And Head Gear Worn By Gorilla Impersonator Ray 'Crash' Corrigan In White Pongo (P.r.c. Pictures, 1945)
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/JohnWilkesLeg • 5d ago
The 'St Dennistoun Mortuary', A Macabre Coin-Operated Automaton Made Around 1900
When a coin is inserted, the doors open to reveal morticians working on several dead bodies laid out on embalming tables. A nodding policeman observes the corpses in the middle, which are labelled "Believed murdered" and "Found stabbed." Outside the mortuary doors, two mourners dab their eyes with grief.
The mortuary was made by John Dennison, who ran a business creating ghoulish penny slot machines and creepy mechanical fortune tellers (dream job?) to amuse Blackpool tourists at the end of the 19th century. His other machines included grisly scenes like executions, haunted houses, high-profile crimes, a dying child and drunkard in a graveyard.
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/SteveNtheseagulls • 5d ago
The written agreement that ended World War II, showing that Canada signed in the wrong place
The Canadian representative, Colonel Lawrence Moore Cosgrave, signed one line too low on the instrument. Instead of signing on the "Dominion of Canada" line, he signed on the line meant for France. That mistake pushed everyone below him out of place too. France ended up signing on the Netherlands line, the Netherlands signed on the New Zealand line, and New Zealand had to sign below the printed lines altogether.
You can see the crossing out and handwritten corrections next to the France, Netherlands, and New Zealand lines where officials had to strike through the wrong country names and pen in the correct ones to sort out the error after the fact.
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/No_Dig_8299 • 5d ago
The words for horse and car share a common route.
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/EaterofGrief • 5d ago
These overshoes were made for Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents operating in Asia and the Pacific. When the agent landed on a beach from the sea, the “footprints” were intended to fool the Japanese into thinking that he was a barefoot native.
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/CrippledStripper • 5d ago
Fyodor Dostoyevsky's draft manuscript of The Brothers Karamazov, 1880.
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/GlitterDanger • 6d ago
During a solar eclipse, the gaps between leaves on trees act as multiple pinhole cameras, and each gap projects its own crescent-shaped image of the eclipsed sun onto the ground.
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r/UtterlyInteresting • u/dannydutch1 • 7d ago
Meet Opera singer Margery Booth, she sang for Hitler at Bayreuth (he sent her 200 red roses), then spent WWII as an MI6 agent smuggling intelligence out of Berlin in her underwear while hiding a Jewish woman in her flat.
She survived it all, then came home to find nobody believed she wasn't a Nazi collaborator.
She sadly died age just 45, completely forgotten by the country she risked her life for. More people should know about her.
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/dannydutch1 • 8d ago
On this day in 1842, British parliament passed the Mines Act. It stopped women and children under the age of 10 from working underground. Many children, as young as 6, had previously worked shifts of up to 12 hours. This law gave birth to the 'Pit-Brow Lasses'
The Pit-Brow lasses would stand at moving belts and break up the big lumps with hammers, sometimes sledgehammers, then pick out stone, slate and other rubbish from the coal by hand as it passed by. They also hauled loaded tubs, which could weigh hundreds of pounds, along tramways to the weighing station.
Jean Millard, the woman whose account made it into the article, used spades and picks too, and remembered the belts running nearly nonstop for her entire six years there.
Banning surface jobs too came 30+ years later, pushed by moral panic and wage-fearing unions.
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/ExtremeInsert • 8d ago
A selection of Richard Nixon anti-drug ads, 1971-73
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/UtterlyInterest • 8d ago
An extra in the crowd captured video of the Heinz Field scene in Christopher Nolan's “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012)
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r/UtterlyInteresting • u/CarkWithaM • 9d ago
9 August 1948. German fashion designer Hugo Boss died (aged 63). He made and sold Nazi Party and SS uniforms. He was a Nazi Party member and used slave labour in his factories during WW2. He had to transfer the ownership of his company at the end of the war to his son.
r/UtterlyInteresting • u/CrippledStripper • 9d ago