Page 3 - Best of the Week

There's a road in New Zealand that isn't connected to any other road!

The Wilmot Pass is located on the main divide of New Zealand’s South Island. It is 2,201 feet high and connects Doubtful Sound, a deep indentation on the coast, to the valley of the West Arm of Lake Manapouri.

Uniquely, the pass is crossed by a road that connects to no other road. It was constructed to facilitate the development of the Lake Manapouri Hydroelectricity Project. It is the only road on the New Zealand mainland that is not connected to the main road network.

Until the 1960s, the Wilmot Pass was only accessible from the sea. The 21 km long, unconnected road was then built between 1963 and 1965 to offer access to the pass.

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St. Augustine's teenage prayer went: 'Lord, grant me chastity and continence; but not yet.'

Saint Augustine was a Father of the Church whose writings were very influential to the development of Western Christianity. He is the patron saint of Augustinians. He was born in 354 but was not baptized until 387. In his youth, Augustine was hedonistic.

He ran with a crowd of experienced boys who would often boast of their sexual exploits. The younger boys, like Augustine, were pressured to have their own sexual exploits in order to fit in. This was when St. Augustine uttered his now famous prayer: “Lord grant me chastity and continence but not yet.”

He did have a thirteen-year affair with a woman from Carthage who eventually bore his son. He abandoned her upon his conversion when his son was seventeen years old.

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Daryl from The Walking Dead was discovered at a party in LA when he started screaming while wearing giant sunglasses!

Norman Reedus is an American actor best known for his portrayal of Daryl Dixon on the hit TV show “The Walking Dead.” He also played Murphy McManus in the 1999 film “The Boondock Saints” and it's sequel.

Reedus was born in Florida but grew up in L.A. He worked at a Harley Davidson shop in Venice and created art as a photographer, painter, sculptor and video artist. In an odd turn of events, he was discovered as an actor at a party. Reedus was yelling while wearing a pair of giant sunglasses. He kept screaming until someone asked him if he wanted to be in a play. His first film was the 1997 horror movie “Mimic.”

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Guy Debord published his first book with a sandpaper cover so that the books next to it would be destroyed!

Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist and a passive aggressive book murderer. His first published work was an artist’s book made in collaboration with Danish artist Asger Jorn. This book is most famous for it's cover, a dust jacket made of heavy-grade sandpaper.

The two authors wanted to book’s cover to be made from an unconventional material that would tarnish the coverings of the books next to it when it was pulled from a book shelf. They contemplated sticky asphalt and glass wool before settling on sand paper.

Because nothing sticks it to the bourgeoisie more than ruining the hard work of fellow underemployed and underappreciated authors.

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Columbus correctly predicted an eclipse to get natives of Jamaica into giving him food and supplies!

After 2 years of sailing, the stars were obviously in Columbus' favor the day he and his restless crew stumbled upon the north coast of Jamaica. At first it didn't seem like it, because the native inhabitants had dealt with Europeans before and refused to give them food or shelter.

Desperate for provisions, Columbus flipped through some astronomical tables and found that it a moon eclipsed was predicted for February 29th 1504. There was some uncertainty as astronomical predictions were sometimes untrue and the times provided for its start and end were for Nuremberg, Germany.

However, at this point, Columbus was so desperate that he yolo'ed and told the natives that through an interpreter that if they did not cooperate with him, the moon would disappear from the sky on the following night. And amazingly enough, it did.

Sufficiently frightened, the natives begged for Columbus' mercy and he said he could consult his deity about returning their moon back to them. He went back into his cabin and returned after the eclipse had finished, taking credit for both switching off and then switching back on the moon.

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