Fun with Wikipedia

Lately, I've started reading random articles on Wikipedia in my free time, of which I have a lot. It's pretty much an endless resource of entertainment (learning?). I like to think that one day something I've read will come in handy. Here are some of the things I've picked up.

Close One Sad Eye is an album by the deathrock band Kommunity FK. The tracks on the album include such masterpieces as "Something Inside Me Has Died." Released in 1985, it was their second and last album (at least the last one anybody cared enough about to put on Wikipedia) and indeed I can see why.

Rohr, Thuringia, Germany is a town with a remarkably stable population. Between 1994 and 2009, the population increased by four.

Maryhill Stonehenge is a replica of the Stonehenge, located in Maryhill, Washington. It was the first memorial to honor the dead of WWI. The design was chosen because the commissioner, a Quaker, was mistakenly informed that Stonehenge was a sacrificial site. Thus, the memorial was intended to remind visitors that we are still sacrificing humans -- to the god of war. So close, two points for effort.

Beyond the Law was a 1992 film starring Charlie Sheen as Dan Saxon, an undercover cop who must commit heinous crimes in order to infiltrate a biker gang. The movie is based on a true story, and the writer wrote the screenplay after reading an article on the subject in Playboy. How could Charlie Sheen have not starred in this movie?

The Department of Peace is a proposed Cabinet-level department of the US government. Though various politicians have pushed for it since 1793, no bill was introduced until 1935. Since then, it has been re-introduced 102(!) times. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is responsible for nine of them.

I learned A LOT about Targa timing, which is a method of timing that was popular with road rallies back in the day. Timing used to be a logistical nightmare because courses were enormous, set in stages, and the winner was determined not by who completed the course the fastest, but by who was the closest to a pre-determined time for each stage. Targa timing simplified everything by lagging the clocks at each timing station appropriately; e.g. if it was supposed to take exactly 2 hours to reach a certain point, that clock would be lagged by exactly 2 hours, so the lead racer should hit it at exactly 00:00:00. Blah blah blah it was borderline illegal (it's complex), and was eventually banned in 1988.

Ransom Stephens is a particle physicist who, among other things, somehow invented a new type of matter. He apparently wrote a novel, too. I think he also wrote his own Wikipedia page because it reads like a self-indulgent physicist trying to sell a book nobody wants to read.

There's a lot more, but I know how much people really hate to read, so I'll cut myself off here. Congrats on your single serving of knowledge for the day.