If you’re looking for a challenge, see if you can reach 82°06′S 54°58′E — it’s the most inaccessible point in Antarctica, the farthest from the ocean and the coldest place in the world.

You’ll know you’ve arrived because you’ll find a bust of Lenin peering weirdly across the ice toward Moscow.

Dig down 20 feet and you’ll uncover a pair of locked doors. Get those open and you can enter an old Soviet research hut, now completely entombed in snow.

And inside the hut is a golden visitors’ book to sign.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Dodge introduced an alluring new option package in 1955: For $143, you could have the Custom Royal Lancer feminized, with rose paint, gold script, and a pink interior complete with rosebuds.

“The first car ever exclusively designed for the woman motorist” came with a rain cape, rain hat, and matching umbrella, plus a pink purse with a compact, lipstick, comb, and cigarette lighter. The marketing brochure read, “By Special Appointment to Her Majesty … the American Woman.”

It went nowhere. Fewer than 1,500 La Femmes were sold, and the model disappeared in 1957.

There are only two places on earth where diamonds can be found at their original volcanic source. The first is South Africa … and the second, improbably, is Arkansas, where visitors to Crater of Diamonds State Park unearth more than 600 diamonds each year.

More than 25,000 have been found to date — including the 40-carat “Uncle Sam,” which Wesley Bassum sold in 1924 for $150,000.

“Let us not be too particular,” wrote Mark Twain. “It is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.”

(Image: Flickr)

When Bellairs rode up the hill two days later, “[f]or more than a mile the course of the torrent could be easily traced, from twenty to thirty feet in breadth, every wall being broken down, and the whole, or greater part, of the soil removed.”

He traced this course to a barley field on the northwest shoulder of the hill, “the greater part of which was beaten down flat and hard, as if an enormous body of water had been suddenly poured out upon it. Beyond this field and on higher ground, there were no signs of the fall of water to any great amount.”

The general depth of the torrent seems to have been 6 to 7 feet; it had broken down a stone wall at Bellairs’ house, burst through the foundation of another, carried off a brick wall 6 feet high, and “flowed through the house, to the depth of nearly three feet, for the space of an hour and forty minutes.” No explanation was found.

At Bradford, England, a girl, aged 16, met death in an extraordinary manner. While in the playground of her school she was caught by a veritable tornado which carried her into the air. … [A] witness who was waiting for a car in front of the school said he saw the girl in the air, her skirts blown out like a baloon. She was 25 to 30 feet in the air, just above the school balcony (the latter, the coroner remarked, was 20 feet high). … The physician who was called found the girl unconscious and pulseless, suffering from severe concussion of the brain and compound fractures of the lower jaw, right arm, wrist and thigh. It appeared that she was wearing a pair of bloomers with an ordinary skirt but without petticoats. The jury returned a verdict of ‘died as the result of a fall caused by a sudden gust of wind.’

– Journal of the American Medical Association, quoted in Medical Sentinel, June 1911

He got only a few scrawls at first, but apparently word spread through the underworld, and soon more illustrious correspondents turned up. In August 1856 von Guldenstubbe produced the signatures of the emperor Augustus and of Julius Caesar, collected at their statues in the Louvre:

He also received writings from Abélard, who wrote in bad Latin, and Héloïse, in modern French — evidently she’s been taking correspondence courses since the 12th century.

Sadly, it appears that death spoils one’s penmanship — here are writing samples from Louise de La Vallière, the repentant mistress of Louis XIV, before (top) and after dying:

Perhaps that’s understandable, given the circumstances.

In the 10 months between August 1856 and June 1857, von Guldenstubbe says he got more than 500 specimens this way, in the company of more than 50 witnesses — but somehow no one has ever duplicated his results.

[H]e drew our attention to the vast difference the position of the shoulders make in a man’s height. This he illustrated by walking from the audience with his shoulders in their natural position, until, having traversed half the length of the room, he suddenly raised them, as represented in the accompanying sketches. The effect was quite startling, and very ludicrous.

– Frank Bellew, The Art of Amusing, 1866

Visit the top of Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka and you’ll see a striking sight — at sunrise the mountain’s own shadow is caught in the morning mist before you.

“The shadow seemed to rise up and stand in front of us in the air,” wrote a correspondent to Nature in 1886, “with rainbow and spectral arms, and then to fall down suddenly to the earth as the bow disappeared.”

See The Spectre of the Brocken.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

[T]here were a number of well-defined steps, carved so to say into the water just like the steps of a ladder, starting from the trough of the wave up to about half its height. Although the waves were moving quickly, the steps remained, steadily extending parallel to each other for one or two metres in length. There were at times as many as twenty of these nicely successive steps cut into the body of the wave. We tried to photograph them, but the very poor visibility and the fast motion of the waves resulted only in a blurred print.

– “Peculiar Stratified Shape of Typhoon Waves,” Nature, Feb. 12, 1955