1. John Carpenter, the first winner of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, used no lifelines until his last question when he called his dad. When he spoke with his dad he told him he didn’t actually need help, he just wanted to let him know he wasabout to become a millionaire.
2. In 1993, a Frenchman named Emile Leray driving a Citroen car in a remote area of the Moroccan desert had a breakdown and became stranded. To survive, he tore down the car, built a motorcycle from the parts and then rode it back to civilisation.
3. While on safari in Africa, Ernest Hemingway survived two plane crashes in two days. He was believed dead for 24 hours until he was spotted emerging from the jungle carrying a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin.
The assassin’s teapot is certainly an heart-stopping name for a humble ceramic, but there’s also an interesting bit of physics going on here. The teapot in question has two separate chambers for holding liquid, and the flow out of the pot from each chamber can be controlled by covering or uncovering small holes located on the handle. So, as the legend goes, a would-be assassin could pour themselves a perfectly fine drink from one chamber and then pour a poisoned drink to their prey from the other chamber, just by discreetly covering and uncovering the proper holes with their fingers. The mechanism here has to do with surface tension and air pressure.
Classic yarns from the classics
“I love reading about stupid drama in ancient Greece,” writes a reader. “There was an athlete named Theagenes who was so good at every kind of athletic contest that when he died, one of his opponents would attack a statue of him out of spite, but then one day the statue fell on the guy and killed him so the Greeks took the statue to court for murder, convicted it, and threw it into the sea. Actually, I left out the best part of this story which is that a plague then struck and when people consulted the oracle at Delphi she was like, ‘well you’ve pissed off Theagenes’ ... So they had to go dig the statue back up.”
