Anthropologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge turned up a surprise in 1890: While excavating a Bronze Age cemetery at Castelnau, near Montpellier, France, he discovered three apparently human bones of gigantic size. On the left is the “giant’s” femur, or thigh bone; on the right is a tibia, or shin bone. Between them is a normal humerus, or upper arm bone, from the same cemetery. At the bottom is a fragment that may belong to either a femur or a humerus; if it’s the latter then it must have belonged to the same giant. If this is right, then the individual would have stood between 10 and 11 feet tall.

Lapouge published his discovery in La Nature that year. “I think it unnecessary to note that these bones are undeniably human, despite their enormous size,” he wrote. “The volumes of the bones were more than double the normal pieces to which they correspond.”

The specimens were examined by zoologists and paleontologists at the University of Montpellier and passed eventually to pathological anatomist Paul Kiener of the Montpellier School of Medicine; the London Globe noted that “Kieger, who, while admitting that the bones are those of a very tall race, nevertheless finds them abnormal in dimensions and apparently of morbid growth.”

“There has been an old tradition among the peasants of the vicinity that a cavern in the valley was, in olden times, occupied by a giant,” noted Popular Science News. “It would be curious if the discovery of M. Lapouge should show it to be founded on fact.”

Interestingly, the bones of further French giants were reported to have turned up near the same location a few years later. From the Princeton Union, Oct. 11, 1894: “In a prehistoric cemetery recently uncovered at Montpellier, France, while workmen were excavating a waterworks reservoir, human skulls were found measuring 28, 31 and 32 inches in circumference. The bones which were found with the skulls were also of gigantic proportions. These relics were sent to the Paris academy, and a learned ‘savant’ who lectured on the find says that they belonged to a race of men between ten and fifteen feet in height.”

But that seems to be the end of it. Was the whole thing a hoax?

During the Great Depression, Babson College founder Roger Babson commissioned unemployed stonecutters to carve inspiring inscriptions on 25 boulders in Dogtown, an abandoned settlement in Gloucester, Massachusetts:

• COURAGE
• IDEAS
• HELP MOTHER
• KINDNESS
• LOYALTY
• IF WORK STOPS, VALUES DECAY
• BE ON TIME
• GET A JOB
• INDUSTRY
• INITIATIVE
• INTEGRITY
• KEEP OUT OF DEBT
• SAVE
• SPIRITUAL POWER
• STUDY
• TRUTH
• WORK
• BE CLEAN
• BE TRUE
• PROSPERITY FOLLOWS SERVICE
• USE YOUR HEAD
• IDEALS
• INTELLIGENCE
• NEVER TRY/NEVER WIN

Babson did some of the work himself. “Another thing I have been doing, which I hope will be carried on after my death, is the carving of mottoes on the boulders at Dogtown, Gloucester, Massachusetts,” he wrote in 1935. “My family says that I am defacing the boulders and disgracing the family with these inscriptions, but the work gives me a lot of satisfaction, fresh air, exercise and sunshine. I am really trying to write a simple book with words carved in stone instead of printed paper. Besides, when on Dogtown common, I revert to a boyhood which I once enjoyed when driving cows there many years ago.”

The boulders are extant today and can be visited on a hiking trail.

Designed in Belgium in 1860, the Apache centerfire revolver attracted a following in the French underworld because it combined three weapons in one: a single-action six-shot revolver, a dual-edged bayonet, and a set of brass knuckles that doubles as the revolver’s grip. The knife and the knuckle duster fold inward, so the whole apparatus can fit easily into a pocket or bag.

Without sights, trigger guard, or safety, the gun is tricky to operate, but then you probably won’t want it for long-range shootouts. “It was designed for self-defence and to be used at very close quarters,” said Charles Hartley, who auctioned off one of the few specimens in 2014. “There is no barrel to the gun so the user would have had to have had it pressed up against someone’s chest.”

Though its pinfire bullets are now obsolete, the weapon’s novelty still attracts collectors — another Apache, auctioned in 2013, drew $2,850.

(Thanks, Carlos.)

Russian artist Anatoly Konenko works on an absurdly, almost unthinkably tiny scale. Trained as an engineer, he took up microminiature art in 1981, inventing his own instruments and techniques. Soon he was writing on grains of rice, poppy seeds, and even a human hair, and in 1994 he began to publish miniature versions of books by Mikhail Koltsov, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Alexander Pushkin. His 1996 edition of Chekhov’s Chameleon assembled 29 pages, three color illustrations, and a portrait of the author into a volume 0.9 millimeters square, at the time the smallest book in the world.

In other media, his feats include a 10-milliliter aquarium, a shod flea, a 1:40,000 scale balalaika, and a 17-millimeter chess set with 2-millimeter pieces. Above: a 3.2-millimeter proboscis midge holds a model of the Eiffel Tower. See his website for more — including a caravan of camels passing through the eye of a needle.

Pains and other such sensory processes may be long or short, continuous or intermittent; but in spite of Longfellow’s ‘long, long thoughts’, I do not think a thought (say, that the pack of cards is on the table, or that Geach’s arguments are fallacious) can significantly be called long or short; nor are we obliged to say that in that case every thought must be strictly instantaneous.

… [W]hat I am suggesting is that thoughts have not got all the kinds of time-relations that physical events, and I think also sensory processes, have. One may say that during half an hour by the clock such-and-such a series of thoughts occurred to a man; but I think it is impossible to find a stretch of physical events that would be just simultaneous, or even simultaneous to a good approximation, with one of the thoughts in the series. I think Norman Malcolm was right when he said at a meeting in Oxford that a mental image could be before one’s mind’s eye for just as long as a beetle took to crawl across a table; but I think it would be nonsense to say that I ‘was thinking’ a given thought for the period of the beetle’s crawl — the continous past of ‘think’ has no such use.

— Peter Geach, God and the Soul, 1969

The malicious spirit Kuchisake-onna of Japanese folklore wears a mask and carries a sharp object. When you meet her, she asks whether you think she is beautiful. If you answer no, she kills you. If you answer yes, she removes her mask to reveal that the corners of her mouth have been slit open to her ears.

Then she repeats her question. If again you answer no, she kills you. If you answer yes, she cuts your mouth to resemble her own.

Happily, there are at least two ways to escape: describe her appearance as average, or throw hard candies to distract her.

After a national competition in 1938, the hamlet of Monsanto became known as “the most Portuguese village in Portugal.”

That’s an odd epithet, because it’s one of the most distinctive towns in the country — its architecture incorporates enormous boulders from the surrounding landscape.

The Spanish town of Setenil de las Bodegas extends along the course of the Rio Trejo.

Some of its buildings are set into the walls of the gorge itself — which can add a startling ceiling to an ordinary street.

New Zealand has a wizard. Born in London in 1932, Ian Channell invented the role at the University of New South Wales when a teaching fellowship ended. “I’ve invented a wizard out of nowhere,” he told CNN. “There were no wizards when I arrived in the world, except in books.”

After a stint as an unpaid “cosmologer, living work of art, and shaman” at Melbourne University, he settled in Christchurch in the 1970s and began speaking on a ladder in Cathedral Square. The city council opposed him at first, but his profile rose. In 1982, the New Zealand Art Gallery Directors Association declared him a living work of art; in 1988 he performed a rain dance in the town of Waimate to break a drought; and in 1990 Prime Minister Mike Moore invited him to become Wizard of New Zealand (“No doubt there will be implications in the area of spells, blessings, curses, and other supernatural matters that are beyond the competence of mere Prime Ministers”).

In 1998 the Christchurch City Council engaged him to “provide acts of wizardry and other wizard-like-services as part of promotional work for the city of Christchurch” for 16,000 New Zealand dollars a year. He helps to promote local events and tourism and welcome dignitaries and delegations to the city. In 2009 he received the Queen’s Service Medal, one of the country’s highest honors (“I couldn’t believe it, I thought it would never happen”).

Now 88 years old, Channell is cultivating an apprentice, Ari Freeman, who may take over when he steps down. “I want the wizard phenomenon to continue,” Freeman said, “and I will totally fulfill that role.”