"The Art of Looking Sideways"

[fiefoe]

More hard-to-make-up stories, some even verifiable

• Ferniehirst Castle, home to the left-handed Kerr family for 500 years, has an anti-clockwise main staircase so that swordsmen had an advantage.
  
• A particularly large (and nasty) spider in Australia only fancies small insects, and so spins a large white cross on its web to warn off larger flying items. The little ones can't see it.
• German Expressionist Franz Marc... decorated nine tarpaulins to hide artillery from spotter planes and ecstatically wrote to his wife that he painted each of them in differing styles from Manet to Kandinsky. Neither Marc nor his artworks survived.
• St. Catherine of Siena wore her particular relic, a leather ring made from Christ's foreskin; villagers in western India pray to fossilized dinosaur eggs, believing them to be Shiva's testicles.
• In occupied Holland Willem Sandberg used his skills to gorge identity cards and survived to become curator of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
  
• Pot polish: the effect on human bones caused by being stirred in a cooking pot.
• Giugiaro... (during the invention of a new pasta, studied) the disciplines of drainage, elasticity, swelling and rupture resistance.. The resulting Marille caused a lady journalist to exclaim: "It is so amusing in the mouth - all movement."
• Dante was undecided whether to write the Divine Comedy in Italian, French or Provencal.
• Charles V of Germany spoke French to men, Italian to women, German to horses and Spanish to God.
• Whistler was descending the stairs to leave when he staggered and almost fell headlong. 'Who,' he demanded, designed the staircase?' 'Norman Shaw', replied his host. 'Damned teetotaller!' was the outraged response.
• Marzipan was named after Eliza Marchpane.
  

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