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Please note
Articles of things considered unusual may be accepted in Wikipedia if they otherwise fulfill the criteria for inclusion. This page is not an article, and the only criterion for inclusion is consensus that an article fits on this page.
Lists of unusual things in Wikipedia mainspace (see Category:Lists of things considered unusual) should have an external reference for each entry that specifically classifies it as unusual, not to make it a point of view (POV) fork of original research. Still, all such lists risk being deleted for lack of a neutral definition of what counts as "unusual".

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This page is for Wikipedians to list articles that seem a little unusual. These articles are valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, but are a bit odd, whimsical, or something you would not expect to find in Encyclopædia Britannica. We should take special care to meet the highest standards of an encyclopedia with these articles lest they make Wikipedia appear idiosyncratic. If you wish to add articles to this list, a broad consensus amongst contributors has identified two main guidelines. If the article in question meets one or both of these categories then it could possibly be deemed unusual:

The article is something you would not expect to find in a standard encyclopedia.
The article contains some form of juxtaposition that most people would find unusual, such as "killer cockroach", "Henry VIII in space", "edible computers"–and so on.

This is a narrow definition. Some articles may still be considered unusual even if they do not fit these guidelines.

For unusual contributions that are less worthwhile, see Wikipedia:Silly Things.

A star () indicates a featured article. A plus () indicates a good article.

Places and infrastructure

Aerican Empire	A micronation with bizarre land claims, such as a mysterious cow pasture and the entire northern hemisphere of Pluto.
Fictional island nations	These islands have not been mistaken for submarines.
Folly	Buildings prized for their uselessness.
Gravity hill	A hill that gives the illusion of objects rolling uphill.
List of places with fewer than ten residents	You could be the town manager, police chief, and town custodian all rolled up into one person!
Parking chair	Using household objects to reserve parking spaces.
San Serriffe	A nation conceived by a British newspaper made up of two islands (Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse), whose capital city is Bodoni, and which features two ports—Clarendon and Baskerville.
Spite house	Various houses built solely out of spite for their neighbors.

Americas

File:Iceland -- 2008-08-08 13-39-41.jpg

Make sure you're covered.

A chandelier, decorating the Sedlec Ossuary, made from human bones.

Action Park	A defunct amusement park in New Jersey that was famous for the thrills produced by the very real dangers of the attractions.
Badlands Guardian	A natural topographic feature in Canada which, when viewed from above, looks remarkably like a human wearing a Native American headdress and earphones.
Beatosu and Goblu, Ohio	Two non-existent Ohio towns that appeared on Michigan's official highway map as a reference to the University of Michigan and their rivals, Ohio State University.
Bubbly Creek	The branch of the Chicago River that is so contaminated with blood from the Stock Yards that it bubbles to this day.
Centralia, Pennsylvania	A town that's been on fire since 1962.
The Compound	A tract of land in Palm Bay, Florida for which a housing development was proposed. After the developer went bankrupt, it was used for flying model planes, paintballing and cocaine drops from Miami and Cuba.
Dixie Square Mall	A shopping mall that has now been abandoned for over twice as long as it was in business. It is a popular target for urban explorers and was featured in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers.
Florence Y'all Water Tower	A Northern Kentucky town's unique "welcome" sign.
Free Stamp	A really big stamp in Cleveland, Ohio.
Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport	Consists entirely of a deeply rutted unmanned strip of soil/gravel and a windsock.
Interstate 180 (Wyoming)	An Interstate Highway with five traffic lights, that isn't really a highway at all.
Republic of Indian Stream	An area of land in northern New Hampshire, USA, that was an independent country from 1832 to 1835.
Island of California	The third largest U.S. State was formerly an island – on paper.
Jerimoth Hill	The highest natural point in Rhode Island. For years, one of the toughest highpoints in the U.S. to scale, not because of its (812-foot) height, but because of an angry old man who lived nearby.
Lost counties, cities, and towns of Virginia	All the places that are no longer found in Virginia, USA – and a few that never were – including Walton's Mountain and Illinois County (currently the home of Chicago, Illinois).
Mary Ellis grave	A grave that found itself in the middle of a movie theater parking lot.
Michigan left	Directions are more complicated in Michigan.
Mill Ends Park	The smallest park in the world – 452 in² (0.3 m²) – located in Portland, Oregon.
Mojave phone booth	A public phone booth that stood for several years in the middle of a desert, miles away from any roads or other structures.
Mollie's Nipple	There are at least seven of them.
Pyramid mausoleums in North America	Arizona Governor George Hunt will heretofore be addressed as "Pharaoh George I".
Republic of Molossia	A one-person micronation in Nevada, USA which takes the meaning of the phrase "a man's home is his castle" to new extremes.
New York City Subway chaining	For obscure political reasons a third of the NYC Subway is measured from the point where a tangent line from 6th Ave at West 4th St. intersects the New Jersey border in Raritan Bay.
Original Spanish Kitchen	A Los Angeles restaurant that suddenly and unexpectedly closed in 1961, giving rise to an urban legend about the fate of its proprietors. The restaurant's contents–even as far as the place settings–remained untouched for decades.
Point Roberts, Washington	When defining international boundaries, sometimes a straight line isn't the best solution.
Rio Rico, Texas	A city that was ceded by the United States to Mexico in 1977 as a result of an earlier diversion of the Rio Grande.
Rough and Ready, California	A currently populated, unincorporated mining town in the United States that seceded from the Union in 1850, forming the "Great Republic of Rough and Ready." Secession was rescinded less than three months later when its citizens noticed that they could not celebrate US independence.
Sam Kee Building	Known as the world's narrowest commercial building.
S.N.P.J., Pennsylvania	A municipality consisting solely of a Slovenian fraternity's recreation center, established (in part) to get around liquor laws.
Spiral Island	An artificial island, now destroyed, built from thousands of empty floating plastic bottles.
Tower of Wooden Pallets	Now replaced by an apartment building, its site remains City of Los Angeles Historic Cultural Monument #184.
Wedge	It's harder than you think to construct the state of Delaware with a ruler and compass.
World's littlest skyscraper	The result of a fraudulent investment scheme, it's a four-storey brick building constructed in 1920 in downtown Wichita Falls, Texas, that has only one room on each of its four floors.
Winchester Mystery House	A house believed to be haunted by the ghosts of individuals killed by Winchester rifles.

Africa

Bir Tawil

One of the few places on Earth not claimed by any country.

Antarctica

Emilio Palma

an Argentine national who is the first person known to be born on the continent of Antarctica.

Asia and Oceania

Baldwin Street, Dunedin	A short suburban road in Dunedin, New Zealand, reputedly the world's steepest street.
Camp Bonifas	The bunkers on this golf course feature machine-guns and landmines.
Cardrona Bra Fence	An eccentric tourist attraction in New Zealand.
Coober Pedy, South Australia	A mining town where most of the residents live underground.
Cross Cafe	A Hitler-themed Indian restaurant, formerly known as "Hitlers' Cross" [sic].
Gate Tower Building	A skyscraper in Japan that has a highway passing through its fifth, sixth and seventh floors.
Helengrad	A right-wing nickname for Wellington, New Zealand, derived from former Prime Minister Helen Clark's apparent steel grip on her cabinet.
Jewish Autonomous Oblast	Far away in the depth of Eastern Siberia there's a place with street names in Yiddish, even though 95% of its population is not Jewish.
Kowloon Walled City	A former Chinese enclave in Hong Kong, known for its extremely high population density, food courts which served dog meat, and claustrophobic dwellings.
Love Land	An erotic-themed sculpture park on Jeju island in South Korea.
Ryugyong Hotel	Once, it would have been the world's tallest hotel–except it lacked windows, fittings, or fixtures for over twenty years.
Shingō, Aomori	Did you know that Jesus escaped his crucifixion and raised a family in Japan?
X-Seed 4000	The tallest building ever designed—houses 500 thousand to one million people and stands 4 kilometers (2.485 miles) tall with 800 floors in Tokyo. Although the building "is never meant to be built".

Europe

Argleton	A non-existent town in Lancashire, England, that appeared on Google Maps.
Baarle-Hertog	A municipality of Belgium, consisting in part of twenty-three exclaves within the Netherlands, some of which in turn contain Netherlands exclaves. (Some houses and shops are in both Belgium and the Netherlands.)
Baarle-Nassau	A municipality of the Netherlands, containing small exclaves of Belgium, which in turn contain even smaller exclaves of the Netherlands. (The borders mean that there are houses and companies which are in both Belgium and the Netherlands.)
Barcelona Supercomputing Center	A supercomputer in a medieval chapel.
Bielefeld Conspiracy	The Bielefeld-Verschwörung tries to hide the horrible truth about a city in Westphalia, Germany that doesn't exist... well, maybe.
Brennender Berg	A German coal mine on fire since 1688.
Carpatho-Ukraine	Possibly the shortest-lived state in history; it was independent for only 24 hours.
Colletto Fava	A 5,000-foot hill with a 200-foot stuffed pink bunny on top.
Ebenezer Place, Wick	The world's shortest street.
Fallen Monument Park	A Russian park best known for its toppled statues.
Ferdinand Cheval	A postman, who, for thirty-three years, collected stones while making his rounds and used them to build a surreal Palais Idéal ("Ideal Palace") of astonishing proportions and intricate detail.
Ferdinandea	An island that is constantly mistaken for a submarine.
Forest swastika	A gigantic swastika made of larch trees that went unnoticed for nearly sixty years.
Gropecunt Lane	A street name found in English towns and cities during the Middle Ages.
Icelandic Phallological Museum	A museum in Iceland solely devoted to the collection of penis specimens and penis-related art.
JASON reactor	The only nuclear reactor in a 17th century building.
Magic Roundabout	Only in the United Kingdom would you find a large roundabout with five mini-roundabouts. (Not to be confused with the "Magic Roundabout"s in Colchester, Hemel Hempstead or High Wycombe–or, for that matter, this "Magic Roundabout".)
Märket	A lighthouse originally built in the wrong country due to inexact maps is reason behind the very peculiar border between Sweden and Finland on the island of Märket.
Monte Kaolino	A ski resort without snow.
Neutral Moresnet	A tiny European region (approx. 3.5 km²) that existed for a century as neutral territory between Germany and Belgium.
Other World Kingdom	A micronation and BDSM resort whose ultimate goal is "absolute matriarchy"–for all men to be enslaved by women.
Principality of Sealand	A micronation located six miles (10 km) off the coast of Suffolk, England, whose population rarely exceeds ten.
Reality Checkpoint	A lamp-post with its own name.
Sedlec Ossuary	A Christian chapel decorated by the bones of approximately 40,000 people.
Smallest House in Great Britain	Only 5.49 square metres (59.1 ft²) in size.
Spreuerhofstraße	The world's narrowest street.
UFO-Memorial Ängelholm	A memorial to a reputed UFO landing in Sweden.
Weißwurstäquator	The "White Sausage Equator" in Germany.

See also

Wikipedia:Unusual place names

Mathematics and numbers

"BEGhIL0S", "hELL0", "B00BLESS", etc–there are many words that can be spelled on a calculator.

−0	Zero has a negative flavor in the worlds of computing, experimental science and statistical mechanics.
0.999...	An infinitely long way to write 1.
12407	A number which is interesting because it is uninteresting.
Calculator spelling	Don't remember this from school?
The Complexity of Songs	A treatise on space complexity of songs by venerable computer scientist Donald Knuth.
Erdős–Bacon number	Combination of the degree of separation from actor Kevin Bacon and mathematician Paul Erdős.
Extravagant number	Don't take it shopping. Not very friendly with the frugal number either.
Graham's number	A number so large that the observable universe is not big enough to write it all down.
Happy number	Not just a cheery song on the radio.
Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia	For beastly people bored of triskaidekaphobia.
Illegal prime	Does the government forbid knowledge of the existence of certain prime numbers?
Indiana Pi Bill	A notorious attempt to legislate the value of pi.
Infinite monkey theorem	An infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters will produce all possible written texts.
Look-and-say sequence	Also known as the Cuckoo's Egg.
Mathematical fallacy	Trying to prove that 2 = 1 or that 1 < 0.
Mathematical jokes	Mathematics can be funny?
Monty Hall problem	The counter-intuitive way to prevail at playing Let's Make a Deal.
Narcissistic number	The pluperfect digital invariant says "Count me in"!
Nothing up my sleeve number	A number which is "above suspicion".
Numbers station	[Six bars of The Lincolnshire Poacher play] "¡Atención! ¡Atención! One, four, seventeen, twenty-four..."
Minkowski's question mark function	A function with an unusual notation and possessing unusual fractional properties.
Ulam spiral	A bored mathematician discovers an unusual numerical pattern while doodling.
Undecimber	In Java, the thirteenth month of the year.
Vampire number	Integers with real bite; some even have multiple pairs of fangs.
Will Rogers phenomenon	Also known as the Will Rogers paradox; the apparent paradox obtained when moving an element from one set to another set that raises the average values of both sets.
Zeroth	An ordinal number popular in computing and related cultures.

Dates and timekeeping

Black days	Now you can enjoy soul-crushing blackness all week long. Thank Nietzsche it's Friday!
Ruth Belville	She followed her parents in the business of selling people Greenwich Mean Time.
Chrismukkah	A fictional Christmas-Hanukkah hybrid, popularized by the television show The O.C.
Dagen H	September 3, 1967: the day that Sweden changed its traffic directionality.
February 30	Not as completely fictional as you might think.
Festivus	December 23: Holiday celebrated by the Costanza family on the television show Seinfeld, since appropriated by many.
International Talk Like a Pirate Day	Shiver my timbers (a-harrr!) every September 19.
January 0	Thought the day before New Year's Day would be in the previous year? Think again.
Manhattanhenge	Twice every year, the setting sun aligns with Manhattan's street grid.
Phantom time hypothesis	A theory by Heribert Illig that the Early Middle Ages (614–911) never occurred. Therefore, we are in 1727 rather than 2024.
Pi Day	The day – March 14 – on which the constant π is celebrated.
Square Root Day	Any date when the day and month are both the square root of the last two digits of the year (the next one being 4th April 2016).
Time Cube	Time is cubic, not linear. There are four simultaneous days in a single rotation of the Earth. "Singularity is a damnable lie" – and so on...
Towel Day	Don't forget to bring a towel, terrible or otherwise.
Year 2038 problem	The computing problem that will arise due to the POSIX Time representation used in many computers.
Year 10,000 problem	The collective name for all potential software bugs that will emerge as the need to express years with five digits arises.
Year zero	Was there a year between 1 BC and AD 1?

Language

"Which këÿs för this heävy plästic müsïc?"

The Voynich manuscript is written in an undeciphered script.

Antiqua–Fraktur dispute	A dispute over which typeface was more "German". At first, the Nazis were for Fraktur...
Apples and oranges	According to scholars, comparing the two may be easier than previously thought.
Arcaicam Esperantom	How do you make things look "old" in an artificial language? By inventing a new one!
Behind the sofa	Where young British children hid from menacing scenes in sci-fi TV, now recalled humorously and nostalgically by British adults.
Brainfuck	Not what you think it is–unless, maybe, you're a computer geek...
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.	A meaningful, grammatical construction that has inspired linguists to talk about bullying amongst New York's bison population.
Bushism	Any of a number of peculiar words, phrases, pronunciations, malapropisms, semantic or linguistic errors that have occurred in the public speaking of former United States President George W. Bush.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously	A sentence contrived by Noam Chomsky to demonstrate that a sentence can be grammatical yet nonsensical.
Controversies about the word "niggardly"	How a simple word can cause so much controversy.
Cryptophasia	The secret language of identical twins, also called idioglossia.
Disambiguation (disambiguation)	For when you're really not sure what you mean. ^{[disambiguation needed]}
Dord	A nonexistent English word, supposedly meaning "density", which was listed in the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary from 1935 to 1939.
The dozens	A usually good-natured African American ritual in which two competitors, usually male, exchange trash-talk until one has no comeback.
Engrish	Attempts by East Asian people – especially the Japanese – to construct English words and phrases.
ETAOIN SHRDLU	Cryptic echoes from the days of hot metal typesetting.
Faux Cyrillic	Give text some of that Яussiaи flavour.
Fedspeak	A deliberately confusing, carefully rehearsed cryptic language, whose delphic dialect is used to effectively prevent the understanding of Fed policy.
Fictitious entry	The content may be fictitious, but the entry is a fact.
Fnord	Deliberately misleading, irrelevant or false information meant to suggest conspiracy. A popular word among Discordians.
Ghoti	As good an argument as any for English spelling reform.
How now brown cow	A way to greet those well versed in rhetoric.
Hyphen War	A dash between communism and independence.
Inherently funny word	Some influential comedians have long regarded certain words in the English language as humorous because of their sound or resemblance to other words. Poodle, wankel, ni...
Intentionally blank page	The self-refuting meta-reference that is "This page intentionally left blank".
James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher	Repetition gone wrong.
Latin profanity	Latin for the profane.
Leet	Th3 1@ngu/\&e 0f H@xx0rz.
List of English words containing Q not followed by U	A Scrabbler's dream article.
List of ethnic slurs	Ever wondered why they got so angry at you?
List of lists of lists	Wrap your head around that one.
List of words that comprise a single sound	Uttering a single sound may sometimes suffice to express an entire idea.
Longest word in English	Floccinaucinihilipilification, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and other contenders.
Mamihlapinatapai	The Guinness World Record holder for the "most succinct word".
Martian language	Chinese language + Internet = new language.
Metal umlaut	Gïvë thë lögö för ÿöür hëävy mëtäl bänd ä töügh Gërmänïc fëël.
Mother insult	What is this article about? Your Mom!
Phaistos Disc	Ancient spirals of undeciphered hieroglyphs.
Placeholder name	You know, thingamajigs, doohickeys, whatchamacallits...
Pompatus	All Steve Miller's fault.
RAS syndrome	...which is itself an example of RAS.
Russenorsk	A Slavic-Scandinavian hybrid that lasted only 150 years.
Robert Shields	You think you are hooked on recording every detail of your life..?
Siamese twins in the English language	Conjoined words.
Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters "George"	An association formed to oppose the custom of addressing railway sleeping car porters as "George" regardless of their actual name.
Thinking about the immortality of the crab	A colorful Spanish idiom for daydreaming; try using this one if your teacher notices you becoming inattentive in class.
Toynbee tiles	Tiles found embedded in asphalt, usually sporting cryptic messages.
Unknown unknown	Things that we don't know we don't know.
Voynich manuscript	An undeciphered illustrated book written six hundred or so years ago, by an anonymous author using an unidentified alphabet.
Words without vowels	Nt s hrd t prnnce s y'd thnk!

Names

File:Eristalis gatesi.jpg

Bill Gates' flower fly.

Adolf Lu Hitler Marak	A politician in the Indian state of Meghalaya, where people are commonly given names such as "Lenin R. Marak", "Stalin L. Nangmin", "Frankenstein W. Momin" and "Tony Curtis Lyngdoh". He claims to be "happy with [his] name, although I don't have any dictatorial tendencies".
Aptostichus stephencolberti	A trapdoor spider named after Stephen Colbert. Naturally, because he asked for it.
Anal language	13,000 people speak Anal. Mostly in India and Myanmar. Not to be confused with the Anus language, spoken in Indonesia.
Dick Assman	A Saskatchewan service station owner whose name garnered international attention in 1995.
Praise-God Barebone	Christened Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebone; not to be confused with Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon.
Bill Gates' flower fly	A flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, named after Bill Gates.
Deportivo Wanka	An unfortunately named Peruvian football team whose strips are remarkably popular in Britain.
Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitäten-hauptbetriebswerkbauunter-beamtengesellschaft	An officials' association in pre-war Vienna, Austria of a shipping company for transporting passengers and cargo on the Danube.
GoldenPalace.com Monkey	A new species of monkey that was officially named after the GoldenPalace.com internet casino.
Lazarus taxon	Leaping Lazarus! Somewhat like Monty Python's Dead Parrot, it's not really dead, it's just resting.
Jennifer 8. Lee	A New York Times reporter whose middle name is the number eight.
Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache	If you think that's a bad name, his brother was "Lyulph Ydwallo Odin Nestor Egbert Lyonel Toedmag Hugh Erchenwyne Saxon Esa Cromwell Orma Nevill Dysart Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache".
List of names for the Wild Turkey	Not included: "the Wild Turkey".
Seán Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus	An Irish politician who changes his name to emphasize political affiliations.
Mannanafnanefnd	A committee in Iceland that determines whether a name is suitable for integration into the Icelandic language. Apparently voted yes about themselves.
Mothers against decapentaplegic homolog 3	Actually, it's a polypeptide.
Neville Neville	The father of Phil Neville and Gary Neville, English footballers.
Pikachurin	An extracellular matrix-like retinal protein named after Pikachu.
Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville	A warning to us all about taking double-barrelled surnames too far...
Scrotum humanum	Nothing to do with trouser snakes, but lizards of an entirely different scale.
Setaceous Hebrew Character	A European moth with wing markings bearing a chance resemblance to a letter in the Hebrew alphabet.
Covered smut, False loose smut, and Loose smut	You may snicker now, but if you had any one of those, I guarantee you wouldn't be laughing much.
Sonic hedgehog	A protein in the vertebrate hedgehog family that was officially named after Sega's video game character Sonic the Hedgehog.
Strigiphilus garylarsoni	A biting louse named for cartoonist Gary Larson of Far Side fame.
Thursday October Christian I	The son of Fletcher Christian, leader of the mutiny on the Bounty.
Wallsend Metro station	All railroads lead to Rome. With "no smoking" signs, although tobacco was unknown to ancient Romans...
Wolfe+585, Senior	Longest name ever given.
Zombie taxon	Paleontology of the undead.
Zyzyxia lundellii and Zyzzyva	The last plant name and animal name in the dictionary, respectively.

Science

"To type, or not to type..."
No, just keep typing.

There's no requirement that north faces upward.

Don't reach for that sick bag 'til you're back on the floor.

Archaeoacoustics	Can ancient pottery be used to play back recorded voices from the distant past?
Ota Benga	The tragic story of a Pygmy man from the Belgian Congo who was briefly exhibited in the Bronx Zoo.
Bloop	Does a mystery sound from the bottom of the sea indicate that Cthulhu may awake...?
Buttered cat paradox	If a cat always lands on its feet and toast always lands buttered-side-down, what if...?
Colors of noise	Including white, pink, purple, blue...
Demon core	This chunk of metal only killed twice!
Vladimir Demikhov	Eminent Soviet biologist and father of the canine head transplant.
Natasha Demkina	Russian girl who claims to have X-ray vision.
Drake's Plate of Brass	A forgery-related practical joke that went horribly awry.
Elvis taxon	A taxon (species, genus, family etc.) that is believed to be extinct but is falsely claimed by someone to still exist.
Expanding earth	A theory that earth is growing.
Fecal anthropology	The study of our ancestors' poop.
Flat Earth society	A British society that holds the belief that Earth is flat, not spherical.
Flying ice cube	They happen to live inside the computers of scientists trying to simulate molecules.
Gimli Glider	Due to an input error, a Boeing 767 plane runs out of fuel mid-flight and becomes a glider.
Guided rat	Implanted electrodes let researchers "steer the animal over an obstacle course, making it twist, turn and even jump on demand".
David Hahn	A 17-year old, known as the Radioactive Boy Scout, who irradiated his back yard attempting to build a nuclear breeder reactor from spare parts.
The Hum	A phenomenon involving a persistent and invasive low-frequency noise of a humming character and unknown origin, not audible to all people, reported in various geographical locations.
ISO 3103	The ISO standard cup of tea.
List of Ig Nobel Prize winners	Nobel Prize meets Weird Science. Result: Award-winning papers like "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts" and "Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans".
List of snow events in Florida	Yes, snow is not unknown in the "Sunshine State".
List of unusual units of measurement	Fortnights and nibbles, super feet and Sagans.
Magic smoke	An alternative theory of integrated circuits: once the smoke is released they no longer work.
MK-ULTRA	When a late-night radio host claims to have been brainwashed by the CIA, you may want to think twice.
Mumbai "Sweet" Seawater Incident	Salty creek becomes sweet for one tide cycle.
Nacirema	An obscure New World tribe with some interesting practices.
'Pataphysics	A parody of science that purports to study what lies beyond the realm of metaphysics.
Pathological science	A pejorative term for scientific ideas that will simply not "go away", long after they are given up on as wrong by the majority of scientists in the field.
Pauli effect	Something in the lab not working? Technical difficulties? Blame this guy.
Quantum suicide and immortality	An infinite number of parallel universes means that any one person will always live forever.
Raining animals	When it's literally raining cats and dogs.
Raven paradox	First, you'll grant that all ravens are black, yes...?
Red rain in Kerala	Did blood rain from the sky?
Reversed map	A reversed map of the world, against conventional projections which have north at the top.
S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897	An ill-fated attempt to reach the North Pole.
School bus yellow	A color especially formulated for use on U.S. school buses.
Smoot	A strange unit of distance used to measure the Harvard Bridge.
Sokal affair	Physicist Alan Sokal demonstrates that at least some postmodernists can't see an emperor with no clothes.
Sound of fingernails scraping chalkboard	Urrrgggh!
Roy Sullivan	An unlucky park ranger who got hit by lightning seven times. And survived them all.
Toilet-related injury	Not all injuries and deaths linked to toilets are urban legends.
Toilet paper orientation	On the pros and cons of letting toilet paper hang over or under the roll.
Tomacco	A made-up word courtesy of The Simpsons that resulted in a real-life application.
Traumatic insemination	A form of mating in invertebrates in which the male stabs the female in the abdomen with his penis, and injects his sperm through the wound.
Vomit Comet	Lack of gravity is not good for the stomach.
Waffle House Index	The U.S. government's alternative measure of disaster impact.
Wrap rage	Ever been driven mad by packaging that just won't open?

Chemistry and material science

Dihydrogen monoxide	A commonly used chemical that can be deadly to all forms of plant and animal life, contributing to global warming, erosion, acid rain, and countless other maladies.
List of chemical compounds with unusual names	Some a consequence of their constituents or origins, others simply the work of whimsical chemists.
Mole Day	A day in celebration of Avogadro's number, 6.02×10²³.
Nanoputian	A series of organic molecules having a structure that looks human.
New car smell	Ahh, that new car smell.
Pykrete	A bullet-resistant frozen-water compound.
Thiotimoline	A fictional chemical which dissolves before it comes into contact with water.
Trimethylaminuria	Do you smell something fishy? It may be you!
Unobtainium	A term used to describe any material with properties that are unlikely or impossible for any real material to possess.

Space and astronomy

Cosmic latte	The colour of the Universe: a slightly beige white.
Embryo space colonization	A proposal for colonizing space using embryos raised by robots.
Extraterrestrial real estate	Want to buy a housing plot on the Moon?
Ann Elizabeth Hodges	The first human in recorded history to have been verifiably injured by a falling meteorite.
List of hypothetical Solar System objects	The planets that could have been. You think Pluto had it rough? At least it got its fifteen minutes of astronomical fame.
Lunarcrete	Perfect for building your own cut-price moon base.
Moon landing conspiracy theories	Fake photos, slow-motion cameras and secret studios. All directed by Stanley Kubrick.
Moon Museum	Only two people have ever seen its exhibits in person.
Nazi UFOs	Did the Luftwaffe, in fact, explore the final frontier and make contact with alien races? Whether the secret Nazi base is on the Moon or in Antarctica, the truth is apparently out there.
Sex in space	And when you've exhausted the list, here's something new to try!
Space advertising	Plans to launch giant billboards into space.

Medicine and health

Accessory breast	Some people have more than two.
Alien hand syndrome	An unusual neurological disorder, also known as "Dr. Strangelove syndrome", whereby one of the sufferer's hands seems to take a life of its own.
Autofellatio	Acts of oral self-stimulation.
Bananadine	Exactly how psychedelic are those dried banana peels?
Bristol Stool Scale	Taking a close look at a toilet bowl for the sake of science. The scale was inspired by eye charts.
Capgras delusion	When you're sure a friend or loved one is an impostor.
Cello scrotum	Don't worry, boys, it's a hoax.
Charles Bonnet syndrome	Millions of perfectly sane people are having freakish hallucinations - and just not admitting it.
Cotard delusion	Suffered by people, very much alive, who believe they're dead.
Dancing mania	Unknown forces cause large groups of people to dance hysterically until dropping from exhaustion in multiple incidents in Europe from the 13th to 17th centuries.
Death from laughter	Don't laugh–it's happened!
Dimples of Venus	For fans of those dimples you don't find on a face.
Electromagnetic hypersensitivity	For those allergic to Wi-Fi
Eigengrau	The color seen by the eye in perfect darkness.
Exploding head syndrome	Ever woken up after an hour or two of sleep thinking you've just heard a massive explosion?
Fart lighting	The act of igniting gases produced by human flatulence.
Fecal anthropology	The study of our ancestors' poop.
Female hysteria	A once-common diagnosis of a range of symptoms in women, cured through masturbation to orgasm.
Five-second rule	The belief that food dropped on the floor is safe to eat only as long as it's picked up within five seconds.
Foreign accent syndrome	A rare medical condition whereby sufferers speak their native language with a foreign accent.
Fregoli delusion	The belief that different people are actually one person in disguise.
Phineas Gage	A 19th-century construction worker who survived a three-foot-long tamping iron going through his skull. His resultant behavioral changes have made him an important figure in the development of neuroscience.
Gerbilling	An urban legend about a sexual practice purportedly observed by some male celebrities.
Gynecomastia	Also known as "man boobs".
Hamster zona-free ovum test	A test, sometimes called a hamster test, involving human semen, hamster eggs, and a petri dish.
Homokaasu	"Gay gas"—mysterious chemical substance conspiracy theory.
Human penis size	Scientific data on average size, racial variations, surgical enlargement and urban legends.
Hypertrichosis	Also known as "Human Werewolf Syndrome".
Jenkem	Huffing the gas from fermented human feces for a hallucinating effect.
Jumping Frenchmen of Maine	Like Tourette's syndrome, but more Gallic.
Klüver–Bucy syndrome	A behavioral disorder with some very odd symptoms, including "hypersexuality" and a desire to examine objects with the mouth. Named after two doctors who gave psychotropic drugs to lobotomized monkeys.
Mad Gasser of Mattoon	A figure said to have terrorized the town of Mattoon, Illinois in 1944.
Maggot therapy	The use of fly larvae in medical practice.
Male lactation	Given the right conditions, just about any male can do it. Go ahead and try!
Male pregnancy	Don't expect humans to do this, but seahorses can.
Maple syrup urine disease	Not quite as tasty as it sounds.
Lina Medina	A Peruvian girl who gave birth to a son when she was five years old, becoming the youngest human mother on record.
Mellified Man	A legendary medicinal substance from Arabia.
Lithopedion	The rare condition of an unborn fetus transforming to stone.
MK-ULTRA	When a late-night radio host claims to have been brainwashed by the CIA, you may want to think twice.
Möbius syndrome	A disease, most envied by poker players, that makes facial expressions impossible.
Mucophagy	The consumption of mucus.
Nacirema	An obscure New World tribe with some interesting practices.
Navel lint	A study proves that most belly button fluff is blue and that women are less likely to have it.
Nasal sebum	Yes, that stuff on the surface of your nose.
Chandre Oram	A man in India with a 13-inch tail.
Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis	A tooth in the eye (is worth two in the foot?).
Parasitic twin	A medical condition where one of two conjoined twins lacks essential organs and must rely on the other for survival, often leeching its blood. An especially rare variant of this, fetus in fetu, involves one partially formed fetus developing within the body of the other.
Paris Syndrome	Particularly common amongst Japanese tourists. Not to be confused with Jerusalem Syndrome or Stockholm Syndrome.
Penis panic	A colloquial term referring to a type of mass hysteria or panic where males grow fearful of removal or shrinking of the penis.
Persistent genital arousal disorder	Not as funny as it may sound.
Photic sneeze reflex	People who sneeze when suddenly exposed to bright light.
Rapunzel syndrome	Chewing on your hair is one thing, but actually eating it can have some untoward results.
Schmidt Sting Pain Index	Created by an entomologist, after having been stung by almost everything, to compare the overall pain of insect stings on a four-point scale.
Sleep sex	A form of parasomnia (similar to sleepwalking) that causes people to engage in sexual acts while they are asleep.
Stendhal syndrome	A psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art.
Tanganyika laughter epidemic	What happens when contagious laughter becomes an actual epidemic.
Target fixation	To become so fixated on an object you are trying to avoid that you collide with it.
Thumb twiddling	Maybe this is unusual to you.
Tip of the tongue	A memory-related phenomenon familiar to us all.
Mary Toft	An English woman who hoaxed doctors into believing that she had given birth to rabbits.
Traumatic insemination	A form of mating in invertebrates in which the male stabs the female in the abdomen with his penis, and injects his sperm through the wound.
Trepanation	A form of surgery where a hole is drilled or scraped into the skull. It was thought that such a procedure could cure problems like epilepsy or allow a person to enter into a higher state of consciousness.
Triskaidekaphobia	Fear of the number 13.
The Truman Show delusion	Those afflicted feel they are being watched all the time by a television audience, like Jim Carrey in the 1998 movie The Truman Show.
Uncombable hair syndrome	Not just a bad hair day.

Animals

Can *you* tell the girls and boys apart?

This goat has fainted.
It has ceased to stand.

File:Tilred.jpg

Tillamook Cheddar, artist.

Anophthalmus hitleri	Rare blind beetle named after Adolf Hitler, poached by collectors of Hitler memorabilia.
Animals in space	An annotated list of the various animals used in space programs.
Apophallation	Can't extract your penis? Amputate and deploy your spare.
Bird strike	One of the more unusual aviation hazards.
Blast fishing	An illegal fishing technique that involves the use of dynamite.
Bobbit worm	"Armed with sharp teeth, it is known to attack with such speeds that its prey is sometimes sliced in half."
Candiru	A small parasitic freshwater catfish that swims into the gill openings of other aquatic species–or human penises.
Cattle mutilation	The alleged killing and subsequent mutilation of cattle, sheep or horses by unknown perpetrators. Some say they may be aliens.
Chicken eyeglasses	Tiny spectacles for chooks, to stop them from seeing red.
Chicken hypnotism	Have you ever wanted to hypnotize a chicken? If not, why not?
Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office	The cat of the official residence to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Chicken sexer	A person who has been specially trained to determine the sex of chicken hatchlings.
Christmas tree worm	A worm that looks like... a Christmas tree.
Cow magnet	A plastic-coated magnet fed to cows to prevent gut damage by ingested bits of metal.
Cow tipping	The act of pushing over sleeping cows.
Depopulation of cockroaches in the ex-USSR countries	A great ecological problem indeed.
Deer penis	It is said to enhance sexual potency in men and was banned by the Chinese government from the 2008 Olympics.
Domesticated silver fox	Soviet Russia subsidizes the breeding of silver foxes.
Elysia chlorotica	A sea slug that can photosynthesise and has stolen various genes required to do so from algae.
Emerald cockroach wasp	A wasp that can ride a cockroach– and drive it, too.
Enumclaw horse sex case	An unfortunate case of a horse riding a man, as opposed to a man riding a horse.
Exploding toads	An as-yet unexplained phenomenon observed in April 2005 in districts of Hamburg, Germany and near a lake at Låsby, Denmark.
Exploding whale	Real whales exploded in Oregon in 1970 and Taiwan in 2004.
Fainting goat	A breed of goat whose muscles freeze for about 10 seconds when it is startled.
Flying pig	The classic impossibility has been officially proved possible by the Internet Engineering Task Force: "With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine."
Globster	Blobs of organic matter found washed up on beaches, which are frequently as mysterious as they are disgusting.
Hardware disease	A condition in bovines caused by ingesting stray bits of metal.
Humanzee	A hypothetical(?) human/chimpanzee hybrid.
Ichthyoallyeinotoxism	Some fish produce a toxin with hallucinatory effects.
Killer Badger	Man-eating creatures introduced to Iraq by the British military. Or not.
List of animals displaying homosexual behavior	Everything from salmon to seagulls to dragonflies.
List of animals with fraudulent diplomas	Your pet may be smarter than you.
Love dart	Hermaphroditic snails play Cupid.
Montauk Monster	Actually a decaying raccoon... or is it?
Nazi talking dogs	The "Woofen SS".
Nightingale excrement as facial	Droppings of a nightingale variety used in facials. Some claim that it helps with acne.
Odd-eyed cat	One of the national treasures of Turkey. As owned by Muhammad.
Orbiting Frog Otolith	A NASA frog experiment, sending two bullfrogs into space to test their sense of balance.
Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus	An endangered creature, whose major predator is the sasquatch. Apparently.
Panda pornography	Pornographic movies created in order to achieve sexual arousal for Giant pandas, which have been proven to be unaffected by the popular drug Viagra.
Paracerceis sculpta	A species of isopod that has some males that mimic females and others that mimic juveniles, allowing them to mate without the alpha males realising.
Pasilalinic-sympathetic compass	The snail telegraph hoax.
Penis fencing	A l̶i̶t̶e̶r̶a̶l̶ figurative variety of cockfighting between some species of flatworm.
Phantom kangaroos	They're not just found in Australia.
Pig-faced women	A lesson to never compare a person's children to pigs when pregnant, lest you be cursed.
Rat king	Not the rodent monarch familiar from The Nutcracker, but a rare (some say nonexistent) phenomenon in which a group of rats grow up with their tails tangled in a knot.
Ravens of the Tower of London	Ravens used as soldiers in the Tower of London
Rhinogradentia	A fictitious mammal order documented by an equally fictitious German naturalist.
Soviet space dogs	That wacky Cold War!
Spherical cow	"Consider a spherical cow in a vacuum..."
Stephens Island Wren	Made extinct by feral cats, possibly the offspring of one pregnant female.
Stray dogs in Moscow	Some of them have figured out how to commute using the subway system.
Stray animals at Indian airports	Talk about wild protesters!
Supernumerary body part	Having an extra body part, be it as simple as an eleventh finger or as extreme as a second head!
Thagomizer	A feature of Stegosaurus anatomy named after a Far Side comic strip.
Weasel war dance	The behavior of extremely excited ferrets who are enjoying themselves too much.
Worm charming	No spade? No worries! There's a better way to get hold of earthworms.

Individual animals

Adwaita	Possibly the oldest creature of modern times, this 255 year-old tortoise was the former pet of Robert Clive of the British East India Company.
Benson	A fish. A big fish. Called Benson.
Jack Black	Queen Victoria's officially appointed rat-catcher and mole destroyer.
Bubbles	A chimpanzee who used human toilet facilities, moonwalked, and (allegedly) attempted suicide.
Bummer and Lazarus	Two stray dogs that roamed the streets of San Francisco, California in the early 1860s and were exempted from local ordinances.
Casper	A cat famed for travelling on a bus around Plymouth, England.
Cat Mandu	The late co-leader of one of Britain's more unusual political parties.
Dusty the Klepto Kitty	Redefining the term "cat burglar".
George	A lobster weighing 20 pounds, estimated to be 140 years old.
Handsome Dan	The various incarnations of Yale University's athletic mascot. "In personal appearance he seemed like a cross between an alligator and a horned frog...".
Henry the Hexapus	An octopus missing two arms due to an unfortunate birth defect.
Hoover the talking seal	Hoover. A seal. Which talked.
Jenny Haniver	A grotesque-looking sea monster made from the corpse of a ray.
Khanzir	Possibly the world's loneliest pig. Even more lonely during the swine flu outbreak.
Lily Flagg	A Jersey cow who made a lot of butter and got a sizable neighborhood named for her.
Lin Wang	A Taiwanese elephant made famous for his participation in the Second Sino-Japanese War.
Mary	Makes the phrase "hung like an elephant" take on a whole new meaning.
Mike the Headless Chicken	A rooster that lived for 18 months with its head cut off.
Nigger	A black dog whose portrayal in The Dam Busters (1955) somehow had to be edited out, overdubbed, or renamed. Nigger's grave remains unredacted, though.
Nils Olav	A King Penguin who is Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Norwegian Guard.
Oscar the Cat	A hospice cat who was featured in the New England Journal of Medicine for his purported ability to predict the impending death of terminally ill patients.
Owen and Mzee	Hippo and tortoise that befriended each other after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.
Paul	A now-deceased psychic octopus who could predict the winner of football games, notably during the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
River Thames whale	In 2006, a Northern Bottlenose swam into London and on to the front pages of the British newspapers.
Rose	A goat that was married to a Sudanese man in 2006.
St Guinefort	A 13th-century French dog unofficially venerated as a saint until the 1930s.
Tama	The official station master of a railway station in Japan.
Tamworth Two	In 1998, two pigs escaped from an abattoir in Wiltshire and made news, both in the United Kingdom and worldwide. (Their story was turned into a TV movie in 2003.)
Tillamook Cheddar	The world's most successful and widely shown animal artist.
Timothy	A tortoise that was present during the bombardment of Sevastopol during the Crimean War in 1854 and survived until 2004.
Tirpitz	A pig who survived the sinking of one warship, to become the mascot on one of the ships that had sunk his first home. Tragically he was then auctioned off and eaten.
William Windsor	A Cashmere goat that is a lance corporal in the British Army's 1st Battalion of the Royal Welsh infantry.
Wojtek	A soldier of the 22nd Artillery Supply Company of the Polish II Corps who also happened to be a Syrian Brown Bear. He enjoyed beer and cigarettes.

See also

List of U.S. state dinosaurs (does not include any of the List of U.S. state fossils)
List of historical pigs

Plants

Arbre du Ténéré	A solitary acacia that was once the most isolated tree on Earth before being run over by a drunken Libyan truck driver.
Gernikako Arbola	The Basque national tree, centre of a number of political disputes, once put under armed guard.
Moon trees	Trees planted from seeds that were taken into space by Apollo 14.
Penis Plant	A cactus the Germans call Frauenglück, or "Women's Joy".
Queens Giant	A tulip tree located in northeastern Queens New York City, that is confirmed to be the oldest living thing in the New York metropolitan area, as well as the tallest tree in the NY metro area. As of 2005, it is up to 450 years old and 134 feet tall. It was alive before the birth of Shakespeare.
Tree of Knowledge (Australia)	Killed by ignorance.
Tree That Owns Itself	An oak tree in Athens, Georgia which is popularly regarded as owning itself.
Vegetable Lamb of Tartary	Money doesn't grow on trees, but maybe sheep do.

See also

List of famous trees

Inventions and objects

Toilets in Japan have some special features.

Cower, you leeches, in the presence of the Tempest Prognosticator!

Aglet	The largely unacknowledged invention which revolutionised shoelaces.
Ampelmännchen	The East German "traffic-light little-man" ("Ampel männchen").
Blue Peacock	A secret British chicken powered nuclear weapon.
Brannock Device	The foot-measuring device found in shoe stores everywhere.
British Rail flying saucer	Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's the 10:13 to Venus.
Canard Digérateur	Or "Digesting Duck", an automaton built to simulate a duck eating, digesting, and excreting.
Cat organ	A keyboard instrument in which the keys cause cats to miaow.
Centennial Light	A hundred-year-old light bulb that has been burning nonstop for 30 years.
Chicken eyeglasses	Eyewear for poultry.
Chicken gun	Valuable for the mitigation of damage from bird strikes. The chicken carcass must be thawed first, though.
Digital sundial	Unlike an analog sundial, a clock that indicates the current time with numerals formed by the sunlight striking it.
Double-barreled cannon	A failed civil war era attempt to create a weapon of mass destruction. Now a monument in Athens, GA.
Dreamachine	A device made with a light bulb and a record turntable that reportedly induces lucid dreaming. (And you thought the makers of Die Another Day made it up. There's still no news about invisible Aston Martin V12 Vanquishes.)
Dymaxion car	A 1933 concept car with 3 wheels. It was 20 feet (6.1 m) long, carried up to 11 passengers, could go at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour (190 km/h), and had a steering wheel that turned the car in the opposite direction.
Electronic voice phenomenon	Alleged spiritual voices heard in white noise and radio interference.
Fictional elements, isotopes and atomic particles	Not actual periodic elements. Many end in '-ite'. Some of the elements may indeed be minerals.
Marvin Heemeyer	Why it's always a bad idea to put the guy next door out of business if he has a ten-ton armor-plated bulldozer in his garage.
History of perpetual motion machines	The concept has eluded and baffled the greatest minds for thousands of years–and will continue to elude anyone who tries to build one.
Hollowed-out book	Why books are popular in prisons.
Human mail	Why buy an expensive ticket when you can go by mail?
Interactive Urinal Communicator	A talking urinal made for advertising purposes.
iLoo	Microsoft's attempt to bring you the internetz at the portable public loo.
Iron Dobbin	A mechanical horse made in 1933 for the Italian Fascist Youth Movement.
Japanese toilet	The most advanced toilets in the world with computers, nozzles and flashing lights.
Jesus nut	Not someone crazy about Jesus, but the bolt on the top of a helicopter that connects it to the rotor blades.
Klerksdorp sphere	Spheres with three parallel grooves dated to be three billion years old... Evidence of ancient intelligent life? An unusual natural phenomenon? Who knows...
Knork	In contrast to the spork (see below), here's a knife/fork combo.
Koteka	An unusual traditional garment of western New Guinea, also known as the "penis gourd".
Hedy Lamarr	Film actress co-invents communication system later used in cell phones, Wi-Fi and other forms of wireless technologies.
List of inventors killed by their own inventions	Perilous parachutes, lethal lighthouses and murderous motorcycles!
Lloyds Bank turd	Possibly the largest example of fossilised human feces ever found, discovered under the future site of a Lloyds Bank in England.
Loose wheel nut indicator	Yes, those little yellow tags you see on truck wheels really do have a purpose.
Method of exercising a cat	A rather unusual patent; some say it's pointless.
The Mississauga Blob	A flaming object that fell from the heavens onto a back-yard picnic table in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada in 1979. The mystery of its true nature drew worldwide attention and speculation. Turns out it was a frisbee.
Mosquito laser	A bug zapper with a difference.
Oliver Cromwell's head	This English political leader's head has an interesting journey after its owner is posthumously executed.
One red paperclip	A man's small piece of metal turns out to be worth more than expected.
Pasilalinic-sympathetic compass	A telegraph system using telepathic snails.
Passenger train toilets	Why passengers must be discouraged from flushing or using toilets while the train is at a station.
Peel P50	The world's smallest production car
Pigeon photography	Pigeons were used by the Germans for aerial surveillance in World War I, and apparently also in World War II. Not to forget the CIA's own pigeon camera.
Pointy hat	A distinctive feature of a wide range of people during history.
Project Cybersyn	Chilean robo-socialism control chamber invented by a Brit with a gigantic beard.
Reliant Regal	A three-wheeled car formerly manufactured in England that could be driven with a motorcycle license.
Rocket mail	The delivery of mail by rocket or missile, attempted by various organisations in many different countries, with varying levels of success.
Royal Mail rubber band	One billion are used every year and often seen littering the streets of UK cities.
RP FLIP	A manned ship designed to be capsized at a 90° angle for weeks on end.
Russian floating nuclear power station	Self-contained, low-capacity, floating nuclear power plants.
Shipping container architecture	The concept and art of using intermodal containers to build stuff.
South Pointing Chariot	An ancient Chinese mechanical compass which took a millennium to reproduce.
Spork	A cross between a spoon and a fork. Not to be confused with a knork.
Stainless steel soap	Metallic soap that removes odours from the hands.
Tempest Prognosticator	Meteorology by frightened annelid.
Tin foil hat	Headgear that allegedly prevents a person from having their minds read or controlled.
Toilet roll holder	A surprisingly complex device for holding a roll of toilet paper.
Uncanny valley	How to measure your emotional response to androids.
Whizzinator	A fake penis used to beat drug tests (complete with dried urine, heater, syringe). Comes in white, tan, latino, brown, and black.
Xianxingzhe	A Chinese robot, according to the Japanese, that will save its country from corporate capitalism with its crotch cannon.
Zanbatō	An enormous Japanese sword that does not exist.

Computing

Blinkenlights	DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN!
The Book of Mozilla	A well-known computer Easter egg found in the Netscape and Mozilla series of browsers.
Brian's Brain	He's so smart, he has a cellular automaton!
Bush hid the facts	Revelations of a vast right-wing conspiracy, or just a glitch?
The computers take over	A science fiction scenario in which a supercomputer becomes intelligent and views humans as a threat to its safety. The computer will then try to wipe out the human race, or at least take control of it. Examples include The Terminator and The Matrix.
The Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science	A 1990 academic paper which argues that computer programming should be understood as a branch of mathematics, and that the formal provability of a program is a major criterion for correctness.
Dogcow	A glyph from an old Apple font representing a creature that makes the noise "Moof!".
Esoteric programming language	Refers to programming languages designed as a test of the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, or as jokes, and not with the intention of being adopted for real-world programming.
Guru Meditation error	If you thought the blue screen of death was bad, this computer error would hamper your quest to reach Nirvana.
I Am Rich	You must be if you could afford this US$999.99 iPhone application that did, well, not very much of anything.
iFart Mobile	Setting the precedent for useless iPhone apps everywhere.
IP over Avian Carriers	An internet protocol for sending data packets using homing pigeons.
iSmell	A computer peripheral designed to emit smells for websites and emails, later named one of the "Worst Tech Products" by PC Magazine.
Lenna	How an image of a nude Playboy model became the industry-standard digital image compression test subject.
lp0 on fire	Want to panic a Unix user? Display an error that their printer is on fire.
MacQuarium	Vintage Macintosh computers-turned-fishtanks.
MONIAC Computer	A water-based analogue computer used to model the United Kingdom economy, bringing a new meaning to the term liquidity.
Office Assistant	Microsoft's anthropomorphic paperclip that pops up in Word 97.
Reality distortion field	Surely an obscure quantum-physics phenomenon? Nope!
Scunthorpe problem	Spam filtering based on text strings can cause problems. Just ask the residents of S****horpe.
Self-balancing unicycle	The ongoing academic effort to teach robots to ride unicycles.
Trojan room coffee pot	The fascinating target of the world's first webcam: a coffee machine at the computer science department of Cambridge University.
Typographical personification	Have you ever recevied a visit frm teh Typo Fairy?
Utah teapot	A 3D model which has become a standard reference object (and something of an in-joke) in the computer graphics community.

Popular culture, entertainment and the arts

File:Animegao.altonthompson.jpg

It's cosplay time!

File:Ghost ride the whip.jpg

Ghost riding the whip.

C'est Le Pétomane–who "performed" for royalty.

The Aristocrats	A joke considered to be both "the world's funniest" and "the world's worst". Also a 2005 documentary of the same name.
Bigipedia	A unique experiment in "broadwebcasting", Bigipedia is the website on your radio. In association with Chianto—"Officially recognised by the EU as a wine-type product".
Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them! controversy	T-shirt slogan aimed towards young women, rocks aimed towards young men.
George P. Burdell	A fictitious student officially enrolled at Georgia Tech in 1927, and who has been continuously enrolled at the school ever since.
The Bus Uncle	A Hong Kong resident gets into an uncomfortably tense argument with a fellow passenger—all caught on video.
Conan the Librarian	A perennial parody of Conan the Barbarian that has appeared in film, television, comics, and fan fiction.
Cosplay	A Japanese subculture centered on dressing as characters from manga, anime, and video games.
Croydon facelift	A hairstyle peculiar to parts of England.
Cultural depictions of Napoleon	Fictional characters believing they are Napoleon are often used to suggest mental ill health.
Cuteness in Japanese culture	It's not just Hello Kitty and Pikachu.
Donkey punch	Allegedly a sex move involving punching one's partner in the back of the head during intercourse.
Drop bear	A fictitious Australian marsupial supposedly related to the koala.
Evil clown	A recent development in American popular culture in which the playful trope of the clown is rendered as disturbing through the use of dark humor and horror elements.
Evil Overlord List	How to avoid the movie clichés.
Flash mob	Wherein a group of people quickly meet up, engage in a random action such as a pillow fight, then disappear just as quickly.
Fuck for Forest	Do your bit to save the rainforest—have an orgy!
Garden Gnome Liberation Front	Vive la révolution des gnomes!
Ghost ride	One of the latest trends to be popularized by hyphy culture.
Gurn	A Western term for creating odd appearances of the face.
Happy slapping	Hurting someone while taking a picture of them, usually with a camera phone.
Human rainbow	A huge gathering of colours.
Issei Sagawa	Writer, commentator, minor celebrity, murderer, and cannibal.
Kayfabe	In professional wrestling, the portrayal of events within the industry as real.
Love padlocks	A fence in the southern Hungarian town of Pécs where lovers clamp padlocks
Masturbate-a-thon	A charity fundraiser that involves self-pleasure.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri	An Iranian refugee who lived in Charles de Gaulle Airport from 1988 until 2006.
Meta-joke	A joke that refers to itself as the joke.
Metafiction	Fictional fiction.
Mile High Club	Soaring members.
Mooning the Cog	Bad weather isn't the only reason to avoid the summit of Mount Washington.
Muffin top	A marketing mishap, many well-meaning young women, and vanity came together to form this demographic.
Nazi chic	The approving use of Nazi-era style, imagery, and paraphernalia in clothing and popular culture.
No soap radio	A prank joke intended to fool one of its listeners into believing that it is a joke.
Obay	A fictional mind-control drug that's at the center of a viral marketing campaign.
Pieing	A slapstick stunt, or a kind of political protest.
Pen spinning	An activity in which assorted tricks are used to manipulate a pen in aesthetically pleasing ways.
Le Pétomane	A French entertainer famous in Victorian times for being able to break wind at will. Practitioners of this... art are called flatulists.
Aron Ralston	One tough guy who, in order to escape from death, cut off his own arm with a dull knife after a boulder fell on it.
Real-life superhero	All you need is a cape and a dream.
Rickrolling	Careful: that link you're about to click on might take you to a video of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.
Sardarji jokes	Popular jokes in India, based on stereotype of Sikhs.
Shoe tossing	The practice of throwing footwear, whether for humorous or political purposes.
Three Wolf Moon	A T-shirt with wolves howling at the moon that gained popularity after one person wrote a sarcastic review for it at Amazon.com.
Toilet humour	Humor based upon bodily functions.
Treacle mining	The fictitious mining of treacle (molasses) in a raw form similar to coal.
Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch!	An ad campaign that figured the best way to sell cigarettes is to show all the consumers with black eyes.
Vodka eyeballing	Here's looking at you, kid.
WAGs	Term mostly used by the British media since the 2006 World Cup to describe the wife/girlfriend of a football player (especially one who plays for England).
Larry Walters	Successfully piloted a lawn chair to 16,000 feet over Los Angeles.
The World Famous Bushman	A street entertainer in San Francisco who makes a living by pretending to be a bush.

Games

The Game	A mind game in which players try not to think about The Game – which means that, by reading this, you just lost The Game.
Guyball	A game involving a topmiler; where you do not leave the parish; stickles can be random, orthodox or alternate; and you are encouraged to splice the Matterhorn.
Kancho	A Japanese children's game that simulates anal probing.
Mornington Crescent (game)	A deceptively tricky game of navigating the London Underground—don't be caught in knip!
Polybius (video game)	A supposed arcade game that made players go insane. Symptoms included intense stress and anxiety, horrific nightmares, and even suicidal tendencies.
War on Terror, the boardgame	A boardgame satire of the real "war on terror" that has proved so popular, it has ended up in national museums, in a TV sitcom, as part of a military training simulation and as a teaching aid in higher education institutions.

Art

The 2004 Yuletide Gävle goat. Keep those matches in your pocket, please.

"Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī... help!!

File:Lucyflowers.jpg

"Lucy in the Field with Flowers", with original frame–the first work in the Museum of Bad Art's collection.

Is it a car? Is it a fish?
No–it's Superlambanana!

Banksy	A graffiti artist who smuggles his works into world-class museums.
Bog Standard Gallery	It's a museum... inside a portable toilet.
Boll Weevil Monument	The only known monument built to honor an agricultural pest.
Bottle Rack	A modern art piece created by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. His sister, who mistook it for trash, threw it out.
Chamber of Art and Curiosities	A cabinet of curiousities created by Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria in the 16th century.
Earring Magic Ken	How Barbie's boyfriend, in an attempt to look cooler, became a gay icon.
Dinny the Dinosaur	A larger-than-life, 150 ton sculpture of a brontosaurus in the desert of Southern California west of Palm Springs. Dinny's companion is "Mr. Rex," a 150 ton sculpture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Fallen Astronaut	A small statuette which is the only piece of art on the moon.
Fourth plinth, Trafalgar Square	The horse is missing.
Gävle goat	A giant straw Yuletide goat that is the target of frequent arson attacks and vandalism.
The Headington Shark	Oxford man has had a 25-foot (7.6 m) long sculpture of a shark embedded headfirst into the roof of his unassuming house since 1986.
Katrina refrigerator	Loot this! Free meal inside!
Knitta Please	NY Hip hop graffiti knitters.
La Princesse	A 13-metre mechanical spider which stomped about Liverpool in 2008.
Le Rêve	A Picasso painting that purportedly would have sold for a record price had its owner, Steve Wynn, not accidentally poked a hole in it.
Largest photographs in the world	Includes information on print and digital photos that are reputedly the world's largest.
McDonald's Sign (Pine Bluff, Arkansas)	One of the few single-arched McDonald's signs left.
Mexican Perforation	A French artistic movement that expresses itself in underground places.
Museum of Bad Art	A Museum "dedicated to the collection, preservation, and exhibition of really awful artwork".
Pink Lady	In 1966, a woman secretly painted a 60-foot tall portrait of a nude woman over a tunnel and sued when the county tried to take it down.
Roundabout dog	Seen any dog on the loose while out driving lately? Chances are it's a roundabout dog.
Sacred Cod of Massachusetts	There's also a "Holy Mackerel", Batman.
Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism	Mine is better than yours.
Superlambanana	A statue in Liverpool that's half-lamb, half-banana.
Tillie	An odd painting of a grinning face, that used to be on the Palace Amusements building in Asbury Park, New Jersey before it was demolished.

Comics and animation

Acme Corporation	Their products have been used and endorsed by all the best cartoon characters.
Afghanis-tan	Central Asian history has never been cuter. (Osama bin Laden makes an appearance as a turban-wearing stray cat.)
Archie Meets the Punisher	The team-up you thought would never happen....
Arseface	A comic book character from none other than DC Comics.
Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo	Name of a Japanese manga (comic) whose subject matter is as surreal as its title.
Cartoon physics	In animation, humour takes precedence over the ordinary laws of physics.
Clan McDuck	A fictional family in the style of a Scottish clan, from which a great number of Walt Disney Company's comic book characters held their origin..
Gorillas in comics	A curious abundance of gorillas in comic book plots during the Silver Age of Comics.
Homosexuality in the Batman franchise	For half a century, Batman and Dick Grayson have been rumored to have a relationship.
Jenny Everywhere	An open-source webcomic character.
Moe anthropomorphism	In this time and age even a washing machine can be the girl of your dreams.
Mr. Immortal	A Marvel Comics superhero with no special powers except immortality, who has been killed in ways including crushing, burning, self-impalement on giant novelty scissors, bear trap, cannon, chainsaw, piranhas, ferrets, spear, and python, and alcohol poisoning (three times). Prone to fits of rage upon returning to life.
My Balls	Terror. Madness. Villains. Evil plots. And, most of all ... balls. From Japan, naturally.
Tentacle erotica	Human-cephalopod sexual relations, popular in hentai.

Literature

112 Gripes about the French	A handbook produced to help American soldiers understand the French.
Aldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos	Published in 1825 as a Victorian children's book and described as "a round game for merry parties", the object of the game was to quickly recite alphabetical tongue-twisting mock-Latin gibberish.
Anthropodermic bibliopegy	The practice of binding books in human skin.
Atlanta Nights	A group of science fiction authors get together and deliberately write an absolutely horrible novel in order to fool and embarrass a "vanity publisher".
The Book of Heroic Failures	A book which glorifies failure. Started off The Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain. The book was a success and thus declared a "failure as a failure".
Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year	Who can forget such classics as Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, How to Avoid Huge Ships or Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the Other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts?
La Bougie du Sapeur	A French newspaper published every February 29th.
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest	A contest to find "the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels".
Death poem	The urge to have famous last words, taken to its logical, carefully rewritten extreme.
Henry Darger	Writer of a 15,000-page manuscript along with several thousand watercolor paintings and other drawings illustrating the story, who went to Mass several times daily.
Francis E. Dec, Esq.	Self-styled "your only hope for a future", a conspiracy theorist who mass-mailed to the medias outlandish tracts denouncing a "Worldwide Mad Deadly Communist Gangster Computer God" mind-controlling mankind, he has become a cult figure "kook" for the involuntary humor or poetry of his rants.
Early American editions of The Hobbit	Now collectors' items because of their printing differences.
English as She Is Spoke	A 19th-century Portuguese–English conversational guide and phrase book that is regarded as a classic of unintentional humour since it was apparently the product of translating a Portuguese–French phrase book by non-English-speaking Portuguese with the help of a French–English phrase book.
Evil laugh	"Mua-ha-haha-ha-haaa" and the like.
The Eye of Argon	An infamously bad heroic fantasy novella, written in 1970 by Jim Theis and circulated anonymously in science fiction fandom since then.
The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women	A 1558 diatribe by John Knox against Mary, Queen of Scots and Mary Tudor.
Gadsby	A 50,110-word long book famous for not using the letter "e".
Grammarians' War	At the start of the 16th century, British schoolmasters were insulting one another. In Latin, of course.
I, Libertine	A non-existent novel that was the subject of a hoax intended to criticize the manner in which best-seller lists are determined.
Lecherous Limericks	Dirty limericks... by Isaac Asimov.
"Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den"	A poem written by a Chinese poet in Classical Chinese. It can be comprehended and understood by all who understand the language, even though it consists entirely of the word "shi" repeated 92 times in different tones.
List of books with the subtitle "Virtue Rewarded"	For some reason the "Virtue Punished" books never sell....
Lobby Lud	"You are ____ and I claim my five pounds".
Magical negro	A racist stock character who helps out white protagonists.
Marlovian theory	A theory which states that Christopher Marlowe's unnatural death was a hoax and that he continued to write and publish under the pseudonym "William Shakespeare".
William McGonagall	A writer widely held to be the worst poet in the English language.
Naked Came the Stranger	Journalists prove a point when their intentionally awful sex novel becomes a bestseller.
Order of the Occult Hand	"It was as if an occult hand had edited this Wikipedia article."
On Bullshit	A very serious essay by Harry Frankfurt sketching a philosophical theory of, well, bullshit.
Philip M. Parker	Writer of “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India” and thousands of other works... by means of a computer program.
Saddam Hussein's novels	Crimes against literature?
Shakespearean authorship	A great conspiracy that concealed the identity of the true author of "Shakespeare's" works, implying that all contemporary references to Shakespeare's authorship were fraudulent or mistaken.
Striking and Picturesque Delineations of the Grand, Beautiful, Wonderful, and Interesting Scenery Around Loch-Earn	Angus McDiarmad, a native Scots-Gaelic speaker, writes a book on a Scottish Highland area with the help of an English dictionary to great comic effect and is termed "the world's worst author".
Le Train de Nulle Part	A French novel, 233 pages long, written without verbs.

Music

File:Sinatra, Frank 03.jpg

If you don't do it My Way, I will kill you!

Animutation	The practice of taking lyrics of foreign songs, "mishearing" them into English, and producing a flash video to go along with it.
As Slow As Possible	A piece of music by John Cage to be performed until 2640.
The Boy Bands Have Won	Actually, this album's full title is "The Boy Bands Have Won" followed by a further 151 words. As of August 2009, it holds the record for the longest album title.
Rosemary Brown	A spiritualist who claimed that dead composers dictated new musical works to her.
Cigarettes and Valentines	An entire record by Green Day whose master tracks were stolen.
Curse of the ninth	The superstition that any composer of symphonies, from Beethoven onwards, will die soon after writing their own Ninth Symphony.
The Dalton Brothers	Not to be confused with the Dalton Gang, this fake country group that opened for U2 in the late 1980s was actually U2 themselves. (Similarly, "The Folksmen", featured in the film A Mighty Wind, is a fake country and folk group supporting Spinal Tap whose members are Spinal Tap themselves.)
Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse Present: Dark Night of the Soul	Due to a legal dispute, this album was released with a blank CD-R.
Dark Side of the Rainbow	What happens when you mix Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz?
Das erste Wiener Gemüseorchester	An Austrian orchestra whose musical instruments are made solely from vegetables.
Earworm	It's got a hook in you.
Electroencephalophone	A musical instrument controlled by brainwaves.
Escopetarra	The Colombian gun-guitar
Elvis sightings	There are many who still believe.
Greenlandic hip hop	Yes. Greenlandic hip hop.
Joyce Hatto	A minor pianist who had many doctored recordings falsely attributed to her long after she stopped performing in public.
Helikopter-Streichquartett	A string quartet that must be played in four circling helicopters, the sound remixed, chopper sounds and all, for an audience on the ground.
Hitler Has Only Got One Ball	Was der Führer only half a man?
Industrial musical	A musical production performed for the employees of a business, intended to create a feeling of being part of a team, and/or to educate and motivate the management and salespeople to improve sales and profit.
Jandek	A prolific and pseudonymous singer/songwriter active since 1978 who only grants the occasional interview and has never provided any biographical information.
"Jeg har set en rigtig negermand"	A Danish #1 single from 1970, extolling the virtues of racial equality while calling a "negro man" "black as a bucket of tar".
Florence Foster Jenkins	An American soprano famous for her singing ability or lack thereof.
Katzenklavier	The "Cat piano"; making music from howling cats.
Keepon	A music video starring a little yellow robot designed to work with autistic children.
Leck mich im Arsch	A canon, whose title translates as "Lick Me in the Ass" by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
List of songs topping polls for worst songs	We built this city on not being very good.
Literal music video	What happens when you replace the lyrics in a music video with lyrics that describe what's actually happening in the music video? Hilarity ensues.
The Lillywhite Sessions	Never officially released, and yet fans and critics can argue that it's the best "album" by the Dave Matthews Band.
Loudness war	Why music is getting LOUDER over time.
Metal Machine Music	A 1974 album by Lou Reed that consists of 64 minutes of audio feedback, widely believed to have either been an elaborate joke, or an attempt by Reed to escape from a record label contract.
Manualism	The little-known art of playing music by squeezing air through the hands.
The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief	A three-sided LP
More cowbell	I got a fever, and the only prescription... is more cowbell!
MP4	Rock music and politics does mix.
Musical saw	The least favourite instrument of Ronnie Wood, The Hollies and The Screaming Trees.
Musikalisches Würfelspiel	A system written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in which the musical piece is decided randomly by playing dice.
My Way killings	You can get killed for singing Frank Sinatra's signature tune in the Philippines.
P Funk mythology	An article about the whimsical universe surrounding the P Funk all stars.
Paul is dead	Was Paul McCartney replaced by a lookalike in the 1960s?
Pink Floyd pigs	The band's recurring props and references.
PopMart Tour	Take an unfinished studio album, hold a press conference at Kmart, and put on a show in countries around the world, complete with a spinning mirrorball lemon, a giant martini olive, a large golden arch, and the largest video screen ever toured. That would be U2's 1997–98 tour in a nutshell.
Publius Enigma	A mystery wrapped in an enigma related to Pink Floyd, which has remained unsolved since it appeared on Usenet in 1994.
The Shaggs	None of this band's members really wanted to form a band, nor did they really have any musical talent, but hey, a fortune teller predicted success, so off they went...
William Shatner's musical career	His rendition of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds regularly wins radio station competitions to find the "worst music of all time".
William Stirrat	A man who claimed to have written "Unchained Melody" under the pen name Hy Zaret, despite the fact that Zaret was an actual person who did write the song.
Thai Elephant Orchestra	An orchestra of elephants playing specially designed instruments.
To Anacreon in Heaven	An 18th century drinking song whose melody was later adopted for "The Star-Spangled Banner".
Kazumi Totaka	A music composer who hides his own song in many video games.
Tromboon	An unusual instrument, with an even more unusual sound sample^ⓘ.
Ugly stick	An instrument in Newfoundland, an insult everywhere else.
Up to eleven	This article is one louder.
"Ventolin"	Single by Cornish electronic musician Richard D. James, otherwise known as Aphex Twin; a most abrasive piece of music.
"You Suffer"	At a full 1.316 seconds in length, the shortest song of all time.
The Zimmers	A rock band made up of elderly musicians. The lead singer is 90 years old.
Zombeatles	Paul is undead.

Television and film

File:Ewok SWExhibition.jpg

Now starring in a horror film not near you.

The Mull of Kintyre. Almost indecent, apparently.

An Alan Smithee Film Burn Hollywood Burn	A movie about a director who makes a bad movie, but can't remove his name from the credits because his real name is Alan Smithee. In reality, the movie about the movie was so bad that director Arthur Hiller was credited as Alan Smithee to disguise himself from the production.
Al Murray's Compete for the Meat	A British game show where the top prize is a frozen chicken and the second prize is some sausages.
Alternative 3	An April Fools joke by an ITV science show leads many to believe that scientists were being kidnapped to prepare for the colonization of Mars.
Atuk	The only known cursed movie script, which, according to urban legend, was responsible for the deaths of several prominent and portly comedians and maybe a couple of their friends.
Australia's Naughtiest Home Videos	Forget Turn-On–this never even made it to the end of its only episode.
Big Dumb Object	A mysterious object (usually of extraterrestrial origin) in a film that is there simply to cause a sense of wonder.
Blue Harvest	The best way to keep away the paparazzi away from your movie: give the movie a fake title, like this one used by George Lucas for Return of the Jedi.
The Canadian Conspiracy	A mockumentary released in 1985 that asserts that Canada is subverting the United States by taking over its media.
Censored Eleven	A group of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons pulled from syndication due to their racist depictions of black people.
Conspiracy 58	A mockumentary that claimed that the 1958 World Cup was never actually held. Despite being revealed as a hoax at the end, people still believed it.
The Cure for Insomnia	A movie that runs for 85 hours. Not the longest movie ever screened, however.
The Day the Clown Cried	A notorious unreleased film about the Holocaust–hey, it's a comedy!
Empire	A film by Andy Warhol consisting entirely of eight hours of still footage of the Empire State Building.
The Fantastic Four	Not the 2005 film, but one filmed in 1994 purely to secure the copyright on the characters.
First on the Moon	Proof that the Soviets got there, thirty years before Armstrong and Aldrin didn't.
Flemish Secession hoax	Our regular programming is now interrupted to declare independence from Belgium.
Goofy holler	A stock Disney sound effect.
Greg Packer	A man on the street, no matter which street you're talking about.
Jerry Haleva	A political lobbyist who got a film acting career solely based on his resemblance to Saddam Hussein.
Jumping the shark	Metaphor for the point at which one can speak of a TV show as having had its best days behind it.
K Foundation Burn a Million Quid	Why did the K Foundation burn a million pounds in cash?
Michael Larson	A man who won over $100,000 in an American quiz show because he was able to notice a pattern in the flashing lights on the "Big Board."
Kin-yan Lee	A Hong Kong actor repeatedly cast in Stephen Chow films as a nose-picking, bearded transvestite.
The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World	A movie that runs for 48 hours. Despite its title, it isn't the world's longest movie, but the jury's still out on whether it's the most meaningless....
Manos: The Hands of Fate	A low-budget film created by a fertilizer salesman from Texas, which is largely considered to be the worst film of all time.
MacGuffin	It doesn't matter what it is as long as it drives the plot along.
Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion incident	TV signals in Chicago are twice overpowered on 22 November 1987 by broadcasts featuring a person disguised as the 1980s virtual TV character Max Headroom. The source of the broadcasts and the people involved remain unknown. Ten years previously, the sound during a broadcast by the UK's Southern Television is replaced by a voice claiming to be an extraterrestrial named "Vrillon".
The Metric Marvels	Nothing says 1970s in the USA more than a spinoff of Schoolhouse Rock with superheroes who teach the metric system.
Mexican standoff	That scenario frequently used in old spaghetti Westerns–and revived by directors such as Quentin Tarantino and John Woo–where two or more characters aim weapons at each other.
Monkey Tennis	Hypothetically, the worst television programme it is possible to make.
Mull of Kintyre test	When can a human penis be shown on British television?
Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D	As if that wasn't bad enough, it spawned a sequel.
Pulgasari	A Godzilla-esque film, supposedly an allegory for unchecked capitalism, created by Kim Jong-il and a director whom he kidnapped.
The Puppy Channel	This cable television channel had a simple premise: nothing but puppies, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Roundhay Garden Scene	The first ever moving picture, which lasted for an epic two seconds.
Shaken, not stirred	Why 007 prefers his martini shaken.
Smell-O-Vision	A system designed to enhance films with odors. Used once for the 1960 film Scent of Mystery and never again.
Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome	A tragic condition suffered by some young characters on soap operas.
Spaghetti trees	Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.
SSSSSSS	Dirk Benedict and snakes. Long before the day of Samuel L. Jackson.
Stay Puft Marshmallow Man	Large marshmallow mascot seen in the film Ghostbusters.
Stinking badges	Something nobody needs. Possibly the most frequently quoted and misquoted line from a movie ever.
Taylor Mead's Ass	A film consisting entirely 70 minutes of Taylor Mead's buttocks.
Tomorrow's Pioneers	A Palestinian children's show produced by Hamas and co-hosted by various costumed characters, including one resembling Mickey Mouse. Most of said costumed characters are killed by Jews in some violent manner.
Turn-On	An ABC comedy series that was cancelled even before the first episode had finished.
Very special episode	A genre of television episodes with controversial life lessons interweaved into the storyline, popularized by Blossom.
Wank Week	A Channel 4 project for all those who think there aren't enough jerks on TV.
Tommy Westphall	How a child with autism, and Detective Munch, are responsible for more than 200 TV series.
Steve Wiebe	The star of a film about him setting the world's high score... for Donkey Kong.
Who's your Daddy?	To win $100,000 adoptees have to pick their biological father out of twenty five men.
Wilhelm scream	A stock sound effect first recorded in 1951 and used in dozens of films (including all six Star Wars films, two Lord of the Rings films and Kill Bill).

Video games

Atari video game burial	Are your video games not selling? Why not do what Atari did — bury them in a New Mexican landfill?
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing	A racing video game that is considered one of the worst of all time due to its opponents that don't move, the ability to drive through buildings and accelerate infinitely, and a notorious "YOU'RE WINNER !" [sic] message after each race.
The Book of Mozilla	A well-known computer Easter egg found in the Netscape and Mozilla series of browsers.
Boss key	A special key or key combination used in computer games to quickly hide the game from superiors or coworkers.
Communist Mutants from Space	A Cold War Space Invaders clone in which you do battle with the Mother Creature, driven mad by radioactive vodka.
Don't Buy This	A rare example of truth in advertising.
Gibs	The little bits of gore you get when someone or something in a video game explodes.
Great Giana Sisters	A game that was withdrawn from the shelves virtually as soon as it went on them.
Hong Kong 97	A video game where the dead Deng Xiaoping is a weapon of mass destruction.
JFK: Reloaded	A video game released in 2004 where the player gets to assassinate president John F. Kennedy.
MissingNo.	A Pokémon species that only appears as the result of a glitch, and has since been the subject of many sociological studies.
Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors	A compendium of computer games all created to allow the owner to scam his or her friends. Includes "Desert Bus": a painstakingly realistic 8 hour bus journey from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas through a featureless desert in real time.
Video games notable for negative reception	And we were so sure Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis would be a hit!

Internet memes and online culture

All your base are belong to us	A phrase that originated in the 1989 video game, Zero Wing and sparked an Internet phenomenon in 2001 and 2002.
Boobquake	Female users of social networking websites agree to determine whether their scandalous clothing can cause earthquakes.
Carstuckgirls.com	An erotic(?) website devoted to women trying to free their cars from various obstacles.
Crazy Frog	How one Swede's moped impression went on to earn millions as a ringtone and outsell Coldplay's Speed Of Sound four to one in Britain.
elgooG	A mirror image version of Google: all letters are displayed in reverse order.
Every time you masturbate... God kills a kitten	If that's not a good enough reason why you shouldn't, I don't know what is.
Giant Enemy Crab	An Internet meme resulting from Sony's E3 2006 press conference.
Guy Goma	A bloke who was at the BBC for a job interview is instead interviewed on its news channel about the Apple Corps v. Apple Computer lawsuit.
The Hampster Dance	A web page featuring dancing hamsters set to music. The music (itself a sample) was sampled in a song, and made No.4 in the United Kingdom in 1999.
How does one patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?	An Internet meme in the Russian internet culture. Various heads of state at Internet press conferences were asked this question–here are their answers.
Internet phenomenon	Its name is Legion, for it is many.
Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia	Talk about a major violation of WP:CENSOR and WP:POINT.
Numa Numa	Or how a fat kid dancing to the O-Zone song Dragostea din tei in front of his computer became very popular.
O RLY?	The sarcastic owl image that is becoming increasingly ubiquitous on the Net.
OS-tan	A small Internet phenomenon where certain types of software (including various Microsoft and Linux operating systems) are depicted as young anime women.
Mark V Shaney	A fake Usenet user whose computer-generated postings were created using Markov chain techniques.
Shock site	Don't look! (No, really.)
John Titor	The name of a purported time traveller from the year 2036. He posted on several time travel-related Internet bulletin boards during 2000/2001.
Tourist guy	The picture of a Hungarian man and how it relates to 9/11.
Unusual eBay listings	The strangest things people can sell on the internet.

Festivals

Testicle Festival	Would you like to supersize those?
Toy piano festival	A concerto of toy pianos.

See also

Food, drink, and products

Banana production in Iceland	More weird than Björk?
Beer goggles	Does drinking a certain beverage make other people more attractive to you?
Bird's nest soup	Asian delicacy.
Berserk llama syndrome	The result of being too friendly with llamas.
British Rail sandwich	Definitely not an Asian delicacy.
Boneless Fish	A frozen fish scaled, gutted and deboned and then glued to its original shape using a food-grade enzyme without cooking.
Cannabis foods	Various foods containing cannabis.
Carmine	A common food dye manufactured from insects.
Casu marzu	Italian maggot cheese. Cheese designed to be eaten while it is infested with cheese fly larvae.
Chubby bunny	A common (but sometimes lethal!) game played with marshmallows.
Civet coffee	Not coffee made from civets, but rather from ordinary coffee beans the civet has, well, excreted.
Cola wars	A marketing battle between Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
"Darkie" toothpaste	Racist toothpaste from Taiwan.
Deep-fried Mars bar	A Scottish delicacy.
Deep-fried Twinkies	America's answer to the above.
Durian	King of fruits.
Flies graveyard	A delicacy in the United Kingdom.
Fried spider	Exactly what it sounds like, and a regional delicacy in Cambodia.
Gay Fuel	An energy drink marketed towards the gay community.
Grapefruit juice effect	Be careful–that delicious food item could be dangerous to prescription-drug users.
Greenwashing	This article is environmentally-friendly!
Hamburger University	Where McDonald's employees learn their stuff.
Hitler bacon	Is it kosher?
Hotel toilet-paper folding	Ever wondered why it was so?
Hufu	For all you vegetarian cannibals out there, the tofu product designed to look and taste like human flesh.
If-by-whiskey	A famous speech successfully both attacking and defending booze.
Ketchup as a vegetable	Makes junk food seem healthier.
Kosher locust	Can Jews eat grasshoppers?
Lesbian wine	It's wine from Lesbos–what else could it be?
Luther burger	described as the "cardiologists worst nightmare"
Michel Lotito	Known as "Monsieur Mangetout"–"Mr Eat-all".
Milbenkäse	A type of German cheese containing live mites, which are eaten along with the cheese.
McDonald's urban legends	Is that worm meat in your Big Mac?
McWords	Words created in popular culture as a result of the influence of McDonald's restaurants, e.g. "McJob" or "McMansion".
Modern Toilet	A restaurant chain whose furniture and decor is based on–yes–toilets.
Monkey brain	A Chinese delicacy that has been made famous through films.
OpenCola	The world's first open-source beverage.
Rhubarb Triangle	A recipe or a dangerous area to fly through?
Roadkill cuisine	Yes, Skunk a la Michelin sounds tasty to some people.
Sannakji	Small octopuses eaten alive with sesame oil.
Sealed crustless sandwich	A patented peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Snake wine	A type of Vietnamese wine that includes a whole venomous snake in the bottle.
Soda and candy eruption	Diet Coke + Mentos = geyser.
Spoo	The most delicious foodstuff amongst all alien species of Babylon 5.
Stargazy pie	A Cornish fish pie that looks back at you.
Stinky tofu	Fermented soybean curd is apparently a delicacy for some people. One external link describes its scent as "a used tampon baking in the desert."
Surströmming	A Swedish dish consisting of rotten herring, said to have the worst smell in the world.
Takeru Kobayashi	A slightly built Japanese competitive eater. He has consumed 63 Nathan's Famous hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes and holds a host of eating records for other foods.
Tarrare	A French showman and soldier noted for his unusual eating habits. Among other things, he ate a meal intended for 15 people in a single sitting, ate live cats, snakes, lizards and puppies, and swallowed an eel whole without chewing.
Tastes like chicken	But baked, grilled, or fried?
Tim Tam Slam	An Australian method for drinking tea through Tim Tam biscuits.
Tomatina	A gigantic food fight with a ham-topped greased pole as the start.
Turducken	A de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, stuffed with a small de-boned chicken.
Sonya Thomas	What weighs 105 pounds and eats more hot dogs in 12 minutes than most people do all summer?
Unusually shaped vegetable	"While some examples are just oddly shaped, others are heralded for their amusing appearance, often representing a body part such as the buttocks."
Vegetarianism of Adolf Hitler	Hitler believed that a vegetarian diet could both alleviate his personal health problems and spiritually renew the Aryan race.
Who Ate All the Pies?	A chant sung by football fans in England and Scotland, aimed at supposedly overweight footballers, officials or opposing supporters.
Whole stuffed camel	A claimed favorite dish of sheiks for their wedding banquets.

Sports

You take my knight?
I'll punch your face!

A briefs history of Olympic Flame running.

File:Estonian Carry style.jpg

The "Estonian Carry". Mmm.

Ali Dia	A guy who tricked his way into English soccer team Southampton F.C. by claiming he had won 12 caps for Senegal, was related to George Weah and had played for Paris St Germain. In 2007, The Times branded him the worst-ever player in top-flight soccer.
Argélico Fucks	A Brazilian footballer with a socially problematic last name.
Baseball metaphors for sex	Basic Instinct..? No, Baseball Instinct.
Paula Barila Bolopa	A swimmer from Equatorial Guinea, who–much like Eric Moussambani below–competed in the Sydney Olympics. Her time in the 50m freestyle is apparently the longest in Olympic history.
Steve Bartman	A Chicago Cubs fan best known as a scapegoat for the Cubs' failure to advance to the World Series in 2003.
Bladderball	Yale University's contribution to the world of team sports.
Blood-vomiting game	"Go" is serious business.
Bog snorkelling	The noble art of competitive snorkelling through cold, noxious bog water.
Philip Boit	How many other Kenyan skiiers can you name?
Bottle-kicking	A ruleless drunken rugby-like sport played every Easter Monday since the 1700s in Hallaton, Leicestershire.
Buzkashi	Something like rugby, played on horseback, with a dead goat.
Chess boxing	A sport that alternates rounds of speed chess and boxing.
Competitive eating	In which the main goal is the quick and vast consumption of food.
Conger cuddling	The "most fun a person could have with a dead fish".
Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake	An annual event held each May at Cooper's Hill near Gloucester.
Curse of Billy Penn	How a skyscraper in Philadelphia kept the city's sports teams from winning championships for over 20 years.
Curse of the Colonel	Colonel Harland Sanders wreaks revenge from beyond the grave on a Japanese baseball team.
Disco Demolition Night	What could go wrong with encouraging people to bring unwanted disco albums to a baseball doubleheader and blowing up the records between games?
Dock Ellis	Baseball pitcher who, among other things, threw a no-hitter while under influence of LSD.
Dwarf tossing	A humorous sporting competition where well-padded dwarfs are thrown by competitors.
East Africa rugby union team	Did this rugby team really select a future dictator to play for them?
Eddie 'the Eagle' Edwards	A British sportsman famous for coming last in the 1988 Winter Olympics ski-jump competition.
Eton wall game	A sport played annually on St. Andrew's Day on a 5-metre-by-110-metre field. The last goal was scored in 1909.
Extreme ironing	A sport whereby participants take an ironing board to a remote location and iron a few items of clothing.
Fair catch kick	A little-known way to score points in American football left over from rugby. It was last used successfully in the pro game in 1976.
Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat	Sydney's other Olympic mascot.
Fierljeppen	A sport from the north of the Netherlands, where the objective is to jump over a trench.
Ferret legging	A sport that involves putting two live ferrets inside one's trousers with the cuffs and belt clinched firmly and no underpants worn. Current record is 5 hours 26 minutes.
Football tennis	Wimbledon meets Wembley... in Czechoslovakia.
Football war	A four day war between El Salvador and Honduras, fuelled by a game of soccer.
Fox tossing	A popular sport in 17th and 18th century Europe that involved tossing foxes and other live animals as high as possible into the air.
Eddie Gaedel	A 3'7", 65-pound baseball player. Career on-base percentage: 1.000.
Goose pulling	Hang a live goose from a rope, gallop under it on a horse and pull its head off. What could be simpler?
Hamster racing	A uniquely British response to foot and mouth disease.
Henley-on-Todd Regatta	An Australian boat race that is canceled when there is water in the river.
Human chess	Enacted by costumed "pieces" on a scaled-up chessboard.
Prince Hubertus of Hohenlohe-Langenburg	A blue blooded Alpine skier, from the frozen wastes of Mexico City.
International Rutabaga Curling Championship	Rutabaga curling originated in the frosty December climes of Ithaca, New York.
Isner–Mahut match at the 2010 Wimbledon Championships	A record-breaking 11 hour, 5 minute tennis match at the 2010 Wimbledon Championships.
Jamaican Bobsled Team	The real life inspiration for the film Cool Runnings.
Kudu dung spitting	Games for conservationists.
Barry Larkin	The man who made the Olympic Flame pants.
Lawn mower racing	Leaves the lawn in a very poor condition.
Legend of the Octopus	If you're going to an ice hockey game in Detroit, be sure to bring your octopus.
Lingerie Football League	"Uniforms consist of helmets, shoulder pads, elbow pads, knee pads, garter belts, bras, and panties."
Jeffrey Maier	The twelve-year-old who helped the Yankees win the pennant.
Mendoza Line	Baseball's standard for underperformance.
Eric Moussambani	A swimmer from Equatorial Guinea who, in the Sydney Olympics, took twice as long as anyone else in the 100m freestyle.
Mythical national championship	When is a champion not exactly a champion?
New Testament athletic metaphors	Blessed are the healthy in heart...
Octopus wrestling	A sport which once attracted crowds of thousands to watch free divers wrestle North Pacific Giant Octopus from the waters of the Puget Sound.
Oorang Indians	An all-Native American National Football League team put together as a marketing gimmick to sell Airedale Terriers and known more for its halftime dog shows than for its football play.
Pillow Fight League	The first rule of Pillow Fight League is that you do not discuss Pillow Fight League.
Plainfield Teacher's College	Their football team was un-beaten, un-tied...and non-existent.
The Play	Before going onto the field for your postgame musical performance, make sure the game is over.
Poole – HAL 9000	"I'm sorry, Frank, I think you missed it..."
Rabbit show jumping	Watership up, Watership Down. Watership up, Watership Down. Watership...
Rocket Racing League	A racing league intending to use rocket-powered aircraft to race a closed-circuit air racetrack.
Sark national football team	Also known as The Bad Lions, the only national team that failed to ever score a goal.
Smiggin Holes 2010 Winter Olympic bid	During the 2002 Winter Olympics, the two Australian comedians who gave the world Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat (see above) launched a bid to host the 2010 Winter Olympics in New South Wales, Australia.
Snail racing	Ready, steady, slow!
Sports-related curses	A variety of excuses for bad performance.
Squirrel fishing	A sport of skill and patience.
Taro Tsujimoto	An imaginary ice hockey player drafted because a manager was reportedly "fed up with the slow drafting process via the telephone".
Teddy bear toss	A Christmas tradition in minor league ice hockey.
Traditions and anecdotes associated with the Stanley Cup	An ice hockey trophy with a long history of abuse, superstition, and tests of buoyancy.
Tropical nations at the Winter Olympics	More than just Jamaican bobsledders.
Turkey bowling	So much for "don't play with your food".
Underarm bowling incident of 1981	An infamous end to an international cricket match that was arguably not cricket at all.
USA Rock Paper Scissors League	Organised finger sport.
Vinkenzetting	Finch-singing in Belgium. More competitive than you might think.
Wife-carrying	One need not carry one's own wife to take part.
Wooden spoon	A Cambridge University tradition adopted by rugby league and rugby union, the Wooden Spoon is awarded to the last-placed team in a competition.
Yak racing	A spectator sport held at traditional festivals in Tibet and Mongolia, among other places.
Zui Quan	An ancient martial art wherein one imitates the motions of a drunkard.

Folklore

Pieter Dirkx's imagining of the Mongolian death worm.

Axhandle hound	One of the many creatures in lumberjack folklore.
Bird people	The widely recurring motif in legends and fiction of birds who are people, or people who are birds.
Bigfoot trap	Believed to be the world's only Bigfoot trap.
Bonnacon	A mythical ox which flings burning dung at its enemies from its rear and horn.
Dog spinning	Do Bulgarians really twizzle their domestic canines to foretell prosperity? The UK Green Party thinks so, and they're not happy about it.
Flying ointment	A hallucinogenic ointment said to be used by witches in the Early Modern period.
Gef the talking mongoose	A poltergeist-like creature which claimed to have been an 80-year-old Indian mongoose, alleged to have haunted a Manx cottage during the 1930s.
Global Orgasm	Make love, not war... all over the world!
Jackalope	A cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope.
Jersey Devil	A mythological creature said to inhabit the New Jersey Pine Barrens.
Kaspar Hauser	A German youth who claimed to have grown up in the total isolation of a darkened cell, and was once thought to be linked to the princely House of Baden.
Liver bird	A legendary cormorant or eagle that is the symbol of a major English city.
Liver-Eating Johnson	A 19th-century mountain man with a penchant for revenge and the consumption of livers.
Lluvia de Peces	It's raining fish in Honduras.
Machine elf	An entity that people claim they become aware of after having taken tryptamine based psychedelic drugs such as DMT.
Man-eating tree	A cryptobotanical anomaly claimed to have been seen by early travellers to Madagascar and elsewhere.
Mongolian death worm	A large, bright red worm that kills using acid and electrical discharges–allegedly.
Monkey-man of New Delhi	Reports in 2001 of a strange monkey-like creature appearing in New Delhi at night and attacking people.
Phantom social workers	Mysterious claims of "social workers" seeking to abduct infants and children.
Pickled dragon	A publicity stunt that landed a contract.
Pole, Hungarian, two good friends	A two-nation proverb often cited, usually while drinking, in both Poland and Hungary.
Popobawa	A bat-winged monster from Zanzibar said to sodomize people during election campaigns.
Reptilian humanoid	A recurring theme in fiction, especially science fiction, pseudoscientific theories, and conspiracy theories.
Rods	Photographic anomalies which some think are undiscovered flying creatures or miniature UFOs.
Sidehill gouger	Fictional creatures said to inhabit the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia and the southwestern sandhills of Saskatchewan.
Spring Heeled Jack	A mysterious character said to have existed in England during the Victorian age.
Sweater curse	Think your loved one will be pleased if you knit them a sweater? Think again.
Tanuki	A creature from Japanese folklore best known for its huge testicles.
Tsukumogami	According to Japanese folklore, if you keep your straw sandals (or any other household items) around for 100 years, they may become "alive and aware" and develop eyes and sharp teeth.
Vagina dentata	The tooth, and nothing but the hole tooth.
Vampire pumpkins and watermelons	A folk legend from the Balkan peninsula of south-eastern Europe based upon the idea that any inanimate object left outside during the night of a full moon will become a vampire.
Vril	A belief that aliens controlled Nazi Germany and helped Hitler and others to escape to the South Pole when the war was lost.
Well to Hell	A 9-mile borehole drilled by Soviet scientists uncovers the sounds of millions of damned souls. Hot stuff.

Politics, economy and law

File:Bumpak.jpg

Eating chocolate cake in a bag.

File:Conchrepublic.svg

All hail the Conch Republic!

Comrade! Your hair is not trimmed in accordance with the socialist lifestyle!

File:Fremont Lenin Christmas 2006.jpg

Did Lenin fake his death and move to Seattle?

Acoustic Kitty	A failed CIA experiment at using a cat for covert surveillance.
Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act	An apparently innocuous piece of congressional legislation that became the subject of outrageous but widely believed conspiracy theories in 1956.
Angie Sanclemente Valencia	A former lingerie model alleged to have run one of the largest drug cartels in the world
Animals as electoral candidates	Why be ruled by some monkey when you can get a real chimp, rhino or pig into office?
Bagism	A social ideology created by the Beatle John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono which involves wearing a bag over one's entire body to promote peace and equality.
Beard Liberation Front	A British interest group which campaigns in support of beards and opposes discrimination against those who wear them.
Billboard-Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions	Or "BUGA-UP" for short. An Australian group of subversive artists who live up to their self-description by defacing tobacco and alcohol billboard advertisements in order to promote healthy living.
Biotic Baking Brigade	Pie-throwing anarchists.
Bling Ring	Star of reality TV show gets involved with group who burgles star of another reality TV show.
Ruth Ellen Brosseau	An assistant bar manager who was elected to Canada's parliament from Quebec despite having never visited the district, barely speaking the language and spending part of the election campaign in Las Vegas.
Bulb to light all Ramat Gan	How a light bulb caused embarrassment for Israeli political party Likud.
Burning money	Which can provide for behaviour modification, political notoriety and a warm fireplace. (See also K Foundation Burn a Million Quid in the "Television and film" section above.)
Conch Republic	As a protest against the actions by the United States federal government, Key West in Florida seceded from and then declared war on the United States, surrendered one minute later and then applied for one billion dollars in foreign aid.
Euromyth	Paranoid and imaginative speculations about the bureaucratic excesses of the European Union.
Evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet	What else would you call a Canadian politician?
Flatulence tax	When you keep a lot of cattle, you're contributing significantly to the greenhouse effect ... aren't you?
Fourth International Posadist	Trotskyism and UFOs. Yes, really.
Gatton by-election, 1803	Two candidates, only one ballot cast, in this by-election in one of the UK's most notorious rotten boroughs of the early 19th century.
Guerrilla gardening	"Quick... torch on... plant those carrots!"
Handedness of Presidents of the United States	A statistically surprising proportion of recent U.S. presidents were lefties.
H'Angus	A monkey football mascot who was elected mayor of Hartlepool, England, with a platform of "free bananas for all schoolchildren".
Ich bin ein Berliner	President Kennedy did not call himself a jelly donut in front of a German audience.
Jakob Maria Mierscheid	A fictitious politician in the German Bundestag since 1979, originally introduced in the 1920s by Weimar Social Democrats to avoid paying restaurant bills. Discovered the Mierscheid Law.
Jennifer Gale	A homeless transgender woman that gained some measure of fame for repeatedly running for public office in Austin, Texas and for singing during city council meetings.
Jimmy Carter rabbit incident	Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's scrape with a "killer" rabbit.
Kasongo Ilunga	Although elected Minister of Foreign Trade for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, no one knows whether Ilunga exists or not.
Pedro Lascuráin	A President for less than an hour.
Legislative violence	Where politicians actively fight for what they believe in.
Let's trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle	A television show produced by the communist government of North Korea intended to educate the public on good and bad hairstyles.
Đorđe Martinović	How the insertion of a beer bottle into the rectum of a Serbian farmer caused a major ethnic and political controversy in Serbia in 1985 and contributed to the collapse of Yugoslavia.
McGillicuddy Serious Party	A satirical political party in New Zealand.
Montreal-Philippines cutlery controversy	A 7-year-old boy's eating habits became an international incident.
Nebraska Admiral	The landlocked U.S. state of Nebraska and its "Great Navy".
New shoes on budget day	One of Canada's less grand political traditions.
Niuas Nobles' constituency	An electoral constituency consisting in just three voters, who elect one of their number to one of the twenty-six seats in the Legislative Assembly of Tonga.
Emperor Norton	Emperor Norton I, the man who claimed to be "Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico" in 1859.
Official Monster Raving Loony Party	Among other policies, this British political party advocates the banning of semicolons as "no-one knows how to use them".
Old Sarum	A notorious rotten borough in Great Britain which, before 1832, was entitled to elect two members of Parliament even though it had only eleven voters and no residents.
Patrol 35	The most famous group of Neo-Nazi Israelis.
Pink Pistols	They're here, they're queer–and they're armed to the teeth.
Polish Beer-Lovers' Party	One of the major political powers in Poland in the early 1990s.
Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks	Amongst other insults and profanity, it supposedly told Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire to fuck his mother.
Resignation from the British House of Commons	Illegal since 1623.
Rhinoceros Party of Canada (1963–1993)	A former political party in Canada, which often promised outlandishly impossible schemes designed to amuse and entertain the voting public.
Richard Nixon mask	One of the United States' most popular masks.
Sentinelese people	An autonomous stone-age human tribe which completely avoids contact with the outside world.
Shanghai Fugu Agreement	A completely fictitious international treaty accepted by the German state of Hesse in 1985.
Small penis rule	A technique used by authors to avoid libel lawsuits.
Socialist Patients' Collective	You've heard of the lone nut? These are organized nuts.
Statue of Lenin (Seattle)	How a statue of Lenin made its way from Czechoslovakia to Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood.
Ilona Staller	A Hungarian porn star elected to the Italian Parliament.
Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner	A controversial performance, directed, amongst others, toward an uncomfortable President nearby.
Tsang Tsou Choi	From the 1970s to his death, he claimed to be the "Kowloon emperor".
John C. Turmel	With a record of no wins and seventy losses in campaigns since 1979, he's probably the world's least-successful would-be politician.
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement	A movement that calls for the voluntary extinction of the human race.
Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan	A fictitious scientific study by J.G. Ballard supposedly circulated at the 1980 Republican Convention which, among other things, compared the face of Ronald Reagan to a penile erection.
Nicolás Zúñiga y Miranda	Mexican eccentric who participated in the presidential elections no less than ten times. He always lost but claimed to be the victor, and considered himself to be the country's president for several decades.

Business and economics

Alien abduction insurance	As one insurance broker said, "Let’s face it – insurance is so tedious that if I can enlighten my dreary life..."
Big Mac Index	Big Mac economics.
Ding Hai effect	A sudden drop in the stock market that follows whenever Hong Kong actor Adam Cheng stars in a new TV show.
EURion constellations	Not-so-secret recognition patterns you can find on banknotes.
Men's Underwear Index	An economic indicator popularised by Alan Greenspan.
Rai stones	Stone money, some of which is 3 meters (10 ft) in diameter, and weigh 4 metric tons (8,800 lb).
Swastika Laundry	A laundry service whose electric vans cheerfully displayed the notorious symbol around Dublin until the 1960s.
Tanganyika groundnut scheme	A scheme, stymied by a lack of water, to grow peanuts where none had been grown before.

Law, law enforcement and crime

Acoustic Kitty	A failed CIA experiment at using a cat for covert surveillance.
A moron in a hurry	A real legal doctrine used in passing-off law.
Animal trial	Historically, the law in some areas of Europe subjected animals to criminal liability for their conduct.
Dewey, Cheatem & Howe	A fictional law firm that takes advantage of its clients.
Free Bench	An unusual English legal custom permitting a widow to inherit her deceased husband's land. In one version, she would have to ride into court backwards on a black ram while reciting a nonsense verse.
Guano Islands Act	This strange piece of legislation enables citizens of the U.S. to take possession of islands containing guano deposits.
Not proven	A controversial Scots law verdict for those neither guilty nor innocent.
Lawsuits against the Devil	C'mon - who do you think's going to have the best lawyers?
Lawsuits against God	A notoriously apathetic defendant, he/she/it has never turned up for one of his/her/its hearings.
Leonard v. Pepsico, Inc.	Would you expect to be able to swap 7 million points (worth $700,000) for a Harrier jump jet (worth $22 million)? This man did and took Pepsi to court when they failed to supply him one. Unsurprisingly–to everyone except him–he lost the case.
Memoirs v. Massachusetts	A U.S. Supreme Court case concerning whether the 1749 book Fanny Hill was entitled to First Amendment protection. One of the dissenting opinions contained an extensive discussion of the supposedly pornographic content.
McMartin preschool trial	The most expensive trial in U.S. history, a sexual abuse trial in which hundreds of children made bizarre allegations of flying and killing giraffes, orgies at car washes, flying in hot-air balloons, and being flushed down toilets into secret underground rooms where they were abused.
Miles v. City Council of Augusta, Georgia	Can a city require a business license for a talking cat, and does the cat have free-speech rights?
Nix v. Hedden	The U.S. Supreme Court decides that the tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit.
Old Deluder Satan Law	How 17th-century Massachusetts sought to rid itself of the Prince of Darkness.
Oliver Cromwell's head	Until its burial in 1960, Oliver Cromwell's head, wrenched from his dead body during a storm in 1685, spent most of its time on display.
Prohibition of death	There are really some places where death is illegal. (Although it is unknown what happens to anyone who breaks this law.)
Small penis rule	A technique used by authors to avoid libel lawsuits.
Stambovsky v. Ackley	Also known as the "Ghostbusters case", the court ruled that a house in Nyack, New York was legally haunted by ghosts.
State of Louisiana v. Frisard	A man is liable for child support even if he does not have sexual intercourse with the child's mother.
Taxation of illegal income in the United States	Don't worry: you can deduct your illegal activity expenses.
Keron Thomas	In 1993, aged sixteen, he posed as a motorman on the New York City Subway and managed to operate a scheduled passenger train for over three hours.
Toy Biz v. United States	Are the X-Men humans under U.S. law?
United States ex rel. Gerald Mayo v. Satan and His Staff	Who has jurisdiction over Satan?

See also

Religion and spirituality

"Thou shalt commit adultery." So says the Bible.

A representation of Kolob (reference numeral 1).

Abeguwo	A just-so story about the origin of rain.
As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.	An oldie but a goodie from the Bible.
Asher yatzar	A Jewish blessing, read to praise the ability to excrete urine or faeces.
Axinomancy	Foretelling the future by looking at an axe or hatchet.
Banquet of Chestnuts	Enough to make even the most committed and diehard Roman Catholic agree that the church was in a pretty poor state at the time of the Reformation.
Ben Hana	A homeless man in Wellington, New Zealand who worshiped the Māori sun-god Ra (not to be confused with the ancient Egyptian sun-god Ra).
Bible errata	A typesetter's complaint finds justification in Psalm 119.
Cadaver Synod	In 897, Pope Stephen VI had the body of his predecessor Pope Formosus exhumed, dressed in papal vestments and then seated on a throne while he read charges against it and conducted a trial.
Caganer	A traditional Catalan statue, similar to a garden gnome, that depicts a person defecating. Often included in Catalan nativity scenes or other Christmas decorations.
Cargo cult	Tribal rites and rituals developed in the belief they will attract the goods, wealth and materials–the "cargo"–of a more technologically advanced and affluent culture.
Christmas in Nazi Germany	The Nazi Party reinvented Christmas by removing a certain baby boy raised in the Jewish faith.
Disconnection	The result of a poor signal with Scientology.
Harold Davidson	A 1930s Church of England clergyman, known as "The Prostitutes' Padre", who was defrocked and later died after being mauled by a toothless lion.
Descent from Adam and Eve	Some living people actually claim to have traced their genealogy all the way back to Adam and Eve.
Fluffy bunny	A controversial epithet in Wicca.
Flying Spaghetti Monster	The basis of a satirical religion created to make fun of Intelligent Design.
Gang Bing	After his act of self-castration, he became the patron saint of eunuchs.
The Great Disappointment	Hundreds of people were convinced the world would end on a very specific date. Turns out they were wrong. Ahem.
Hell bank note	Apparently, the Chinese afterlife is subject to hyperinflation.
Holy Prepuce	One of several relics purported to be associated with Jesus. Also known as The Holy Foreskin. (See also Circumcision of Jesus.)
Homosexuality and voodoo	Surely a troll, you say? No! A perfectly legitimate article!
Incident (Scientology)	Bubble Gum Incident, Obscene Dog Incident, Bodies in pawn, blah, blah...
Invisible Pink Unicorn	A satire aimed at theistic beliefs.
Islamic toilet etiquette	The large number of rules to be followed by Muslims when relieving themselves.
Islamic views on anal sex	There are fatwas for everything. Even Ayatollah Sistani weighed in on the issue.
Jedi census phenomenon	A phenomenon in which 390,000 British citizens listed their religion as Jedi Knight on a 2001 census form, which made Jedi Knight the fourth-largest religion in England and Wales.
Jerusalem Syndrome	For some people a visit there is just too much.
Jesus H. Christ	Does it stand for Henry?
Jewish pope Andreas	A Jewish pope?
Kachchhera	Sikh underwear.
Kolob	Which star does God live on?
List of Buddha claimants	Enlighten us, please.
List of messiah claimants	See above.
List of names for the Biblical nameless	Not so anonymous, by God.
List of people who have claimed to be Jesus	Excluding Jesus himself.
List of people who have been considered deities	What it says.
List of UFO religions	Our father, which art in spaceship...
Matshishkapeu	The "fart man" of Innu mythology. Don't cross him or he'll make you constipated.
The Miracle of the Sun	70,000 people in Portugal gather to witness a miracle and are treated to an inexplicable solar event.
Non-canonical books referenced in the Bible	The Bible refers to lost books, and even pagan ones, much more than you would think.
Open source religion	And we're not talking about the Church of Emacs either.
Pope Joan	Are medieval documents citing the existence of a female pope proof of a Vatican cover up or a blasphemous slur?
Pope Michael	Elected Pope in 1990 by a group of Conclavist or post-Sedevacantist Catholics to fill the vacancy they consider to have been caused by the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958.
Prince Philip Movement	A religious movement on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu which holds that Queen Elizabeth II's husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, is a divine being.
Pornocracy	The period of the papacy in the early 10th century, beginning with Pope Sergius III from 904 and ending with the death of Pope John XII in 963. During this period, the popes were under the influence of corrupt women (though not necessarily prostitutes), especially Theodora and her daughter, Marozia. This period is also called the "Rule of the Harlots."
Reincarnation Application	Must be filed by all living Buddha within the People's Republic of China, before they are allowed to reincarnate.
Religion in Antarctica	There's more of it than you might suspect, including five churches.
Religious pareidolia	A tendency to see religious imagery in in the textures of corn chips, cinnamon rolls, toast, clouds, etc, etc.
Rumspringa	Amish Gone Wild.
St. Priapus Church	A religion based on the worship of the phallus.
Space opera in Scientology scripture	L. Ron Hubbard's history of the universe, including alien Invader Forces, "little orange-colored bombs that would talk" and brainwashing episodes in "a railway carriage quite like a British railway coach with compartments."
Taghairm	A couple of uncomfortable methods of fortune telling.
Tiberius Iulius Abdes Pantera	Was Jesus' father buried in Germany?
Turtles all the way down	A myth about the nature of the universe, or perhaps a myth about a myth about the nature of the universe.
Unfulfilled religious predictions	Doomsdays that didn't.
United Nation of Islam	Royall, Allah in Person claims to have spent the 1980s in a spaceship with angels who informed him that he was God and instructed him on how to govern the world. Public records say he was a truck driver.
Universe people	Specific cult in Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Ussher chronology	A 17th-century Irish bishop claimed to know the exact day, date and time of creation.
Who is a Jew?	For those having trouble identifying a Jew.
Wicked Bible	A 1631 reprint of the King James Bible, which contained an infamous printing mistake.
Winterval	A word created as an alternative name for all the holidays at the end of a calendar year. It came to prominence after Birmingham City Council (the English city) used it in 1998.
Xenu	An ancient interstellar dictator who unleashed a genocide which created Christianity and psychiatry and whose story is "calculated to kill (by pneumonia etc) anyone who attempts to solve it."
Zipporah at the inn	God apparently tries (and fails) to kill Moses.

See also

List of sexually active popes

Military

The Bazooka Vespa–the ultimate in Mod warfare.

3rd Dental Battalion	Even Marines have to keep their teeth clean.
Anglo-Zanzibar War	The world's shortest war. The Sultan of Zanzibar capitulated after forty-five minutes.
Anti-tank dog	Soviet weapon of the Second World War.
Antonov A-40	The "flying tank", an experimental Soviet tank with wings and tailboom, meant to glide into the battlefield, ready for combat. Trials were unsuccessful.
Bat bomb	A World War II plan to bomb Japan with bats carrying tiny incendiary bombs.
Battle of Tanga	A World War I battle where 8,000 British troops were defeated by a German-led force of 1,100 Askaris–aided by swarms of angry bees.
Bazooka Vespa	Placing France at the cutting edge of weapons system design.
Bicycle infantry	Soldiers have occasionally been trained to use the bicycle for military purposes.
Boot Monument	In celebration of Benedict Arnold's foot.
Chicken-powered nuclear bomb	In a cunningly misnamed project, domestic chickens were set to wage nuclear warfare.
Jack Churchill	A British soldier who fought through World War II armed with a bow and arrows and a claymore.
Cornfield Bomber	An F-106 jet fighter made a perfect gear-up landing in a farmer's field–after the pilot had ejected at 15,000 feet (4,600 m).
Emu War	A military operation undertaken in Western Australia against hordes of emus.
Football war	A six-day war fought between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969 that was triggered by a game of football (soccer).
Gay bomb	A speculative non-lethal chemical weapon that could be dropped on enemy troops to cause "homosexual behaviour". Not to be confused with the fag bomb.
Glasgow Ice Cream Wars	In 1984, violent conflicts between ice-cream vendors left six people dead.
Grand Panjandrum	Britain's World War II Catherine wheel of death.
Human torpedo	Human torpedoes or manned torpedoes were secret naval weapons of World War II.
Line-crossing ceremony	An initiation rite performed when a ship crosses the equator.
List of wartime crossdressers	Because war demands proper fashion.
Miss Russian Army	A beauty contest minus the swimsuit competition but added the automatic weapons drills.
Montauk Project	Real military science experiment or urban legend? Maybe the civilians who were in full view of the military base will be able to tell you.
Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards	A set of playing cards created by U.S. Army soldiers featuring the most-wanted Iraqis, with Saddam Hussein as the Ace of spades.
NORAD Tracks Santa	A tradition with the American and Canadian military to track Santa Claus for children.
Hiroo Onoda	A Japanese soldier who hid out in the Philippines during World War II, refusing to surrender until 1974.
Philadelphia Experiment	An alleged experiment in 1943 involving electromagnetic technology to render vessels invisible.
Pig War	A war between the United States and the British Empire that almost erupted over one dead pig.
Portuguese Fireplace	A fireplace in the middle of the New Forest
Project Habakkuk	A British plan to construct an aircraft carrier out of ice (pykrete).
Project Pigeon	Bombs guided by pigeon pecks.
Sacred Band of Thebes	An ancient Greek army consisting of homosexual couples.
Sergeant Stubby	The only dog to be promoted to sergeant through combat.
Siachen Glacier	The world's highest battlefield, with very predictable terrain.
Sticky bomb	The most unpopular weapon the British soldier has ever been asked to use.
Stanislav Petrov	Potentially averted a nuclear war.
Tachanka	Twentieth century chariot used in combat.
Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years' War	A "war" that lasted 335 years without a single shot being fired, between the Netherlands and the tiny Isles of Scilly.
Toledo War	A war between the State of Ohio and the Michigan Territory that resulted in one injury and over a century of bitterness.
Truelove Eyre	A man who supposedly saved William the Conqueror's life during the Battle of Hastings.
Tsar Tank	A Imperial Russian tank designed as a tricycle with nine-metre wheels.
UFO sightings in Iraq	Something else for Iraqis to worry about.
United States military chocolate	Originally designed to taste "little better than a boiled potato." Not much has changed.
U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program	A U.S. Navy program which studies the military use of Bottlenose Dolphins and California Sea Lions.
Vasiliy Arkhipov	Another guy who potentially averted nuclear war
War of Jenkins' Ear	A nine year war, started when Captain Robert Jenkins complained that the Spanish Coastguard had cut off his ear.
War of the Stray Dog	Greek soldier chases his pooch across the Bulgaria border. Warfare nearly ensues.
War of the Insane	Hmong revolt against taxing by the French colonial administration in Indochina lasting from 1918 to 1921.
War Plan Red	U.S. war plans from the 1930s to invade Canada in the unlikely event of war with the United Kingdom. Also see the counterpart war plan Defence Scheme No. 1 (the Canadian war plan to invade the United States).
Who me?	A top secret stench weapon designed to be unobtrusively sprayed on German officers by French Resistance members.

See also

Punishments

Drunkard's cloak	Attire for the village drunk.
Scold's bridle	A muzzle for the nagging wife.

Death

Boston Molasses Disaster	Twenty-one people died in 1919 when a huge tank at a confectionery factory burst, sending a wave of molasses down the streets of Boston.
Chess-related deaths	Chess can be surprisingly dangerous.
Collyer brothers	When packratting was taken to a tragic extreme.
Death erection	It is possible to die happy, even if you've lived a less-than-stellar life.
Defenestration	The time-honoured tradition of throwing people out of windows.
Execution by elephant	An unusual form of capital punishment used throughout history. (See also History of elephants in Europe.)
Fan death	A persistent urban legend in South Korea, where the media, and even many medical professionals, regularly report on people dying because of having left a fan on in a closed room.
Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead	An early catch phrase used on Saturday Night Live, based upon the dictator's lengthy death.
Ghost bike	Bicycle rider in memoriam.
Jack the Stripper	The other unidentified serial killer named Jack.
Kick the bucket	The heated argument of the origin of this very funny idiom about death.
Lal Bihari	"I'm not quite dead!"
List of expressions related to death	What do 'go home in a box', 'go bung' and 'hop the stick' mean?
London Beer Flood	In 1814 in London, nine people were drowned by a flood of more than 300,000 gallons of beer.
London Necropolis railway station	A past station built solely for funeral trains
Lord Uxbridge's leg	The grisly afterlife of a leg lost during the Battle of Waterloo, formerly owned by Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey.
Maschalismos	The act of mutilating the dead to prevent them from rising again.
Poe Toaster	A mysterious figure who pays an annual tribute to American author Edgar Allan Poe.
Post-mortem photography	Back in the early days of photography it was common to take pictures of recently deceased loved ones, propped up to look as if they were alive.
Republican marriage	A form of execution in which a naked man and woman are tied together and drowned. (What did you think it was?)
Rookwood Cemetery railway line, Sydney	A former railway line that served a cemetery near Sydney.
Richard Chase	The only way to stop the Nazi-controlled UFOs from poisoning your macaroni and cheese is to inject yourself with animal blood and eat human brains.
Safety coffin	Coffins manufactured just in case their tenant is not actually dead before being buried.
Salish Sea human foot discoveries	Dismembered feet keep washing up.
Sky burial	It's not really a form of burial. Also known as jhator which means "giving alms to the birds."
Sogen Kato	Regarded as the oldest man in Tokyo, he turns out to have died at age 79.
Space burial	Around 150 people have had their remains interred in space. Or would that be ex-terred?
Spontaneous human combustion	The sudden burning of a person's body without any apparent source of ignition.
Toilet-related injury	As if constipation wasn't enough.
Valentich Disappearance	An Australian pilot disappeared in the ocean, having seen a strange object above his aircraft. No trace of either his body or the aircraft have been found.
Video-Enhanced Grave Marker	Graves with video screens and speakers on them.

See also

Questions

Wikipedia is not afraid to tackle the tough questions:

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?	A proverbial question of theology.
If a tree falls in a forest	Philosophy meets the logging industry.
Chicken or the egg	Which came first?
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?	Lady Marmalade wasn't the only one asking this.
Where's the beef?	In 1984, people thought this was really funny for some reason.
Why did the chicken cross the road?	People have asked this for over 150 years.

Unusual featured pictures

Wikipedia:Featured Pictures contains some unusual images.

Lawn mower racing
Train wreck at Montparnasse
The Agassiz statue, Stanford University, California. April 1906
Grenville Diptych
Medieval trepanation
Polydactyly
Isometric projection flaw
Collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge
Defecating seagull
Indecency
Aerial turning house
Tank treads on an airplane
Salvador Dali
Maintenance of Mount Rushmore
One million colors
Keep your hands to yourself!
Like a fly on...
Have no fear, the crown is here!
An elaborate flat Earth map drawn in 1893
Vegetable Lamb of Tartary
Carrots of many colors

External links

Funcyclopedia
Regan, Jim (February 11, 2005). "Remarkable Wikipedia has "unusual" corners". CSMonitor.com. Halifax, Nova Scotia: USA Today. Archived from the original on February 11, 2005. Retrieved 28 March 2011.
Miller, Andrew (January 25, 2011). "The Least Essential Wikipedia Pages". Something Awful. Retrieved 28 March 2011.
Frater, Jamie (March 21, 2011). "10 Interesting And Unusual Wikipedia Articles". Listverse. Retrieved 28 March 2011.
Lih, Andrew (May–June 2006). "Wikipedia Unusual Articles". andrewlih.com. Retrieved 28 March 2011.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: date format (link)
"Weirdest Unusual Article of Wikipedia". Rankopedia. Retrieved 28 March 2011.
"Interesting and unusual Wikipedia articles". The Straight Dope. June 2009. Archived from the original on 2011. Retrieved 28 March 2011. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |archivedate= (help)
A Random Collection of Unusual Articles on Wikipedia game on The Nethernet

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 | '''[[Ben Hana]]'''
-| A homeless man in [[Wellington]], [[New Zealand]] who worships the [[Māori culture|Māori]] [[Solar deity|sun-god]] [[Tama-nui-te-rā|Ra]] (not to be confused with the [[ancient Egypt]]ian sun-god [[Ra]]).
+| A homeless man in [[Wellington]], [[New Zealand]] who worshiped the [[Māori culture|Māori]] [[Solar deity|sun-god]] [[Tama-nui-te-rā|Ra]] (not to be confused with the [[ancient Egypt]]ian sun-god [[Ra]]).
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 | '''[[Bible errata]]'''