This page is for Wikipedians to list articles that seem a bit unusual. These articles are valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, but are somewhat odd, whimsical, or... well, something you wouldn't expect to find in Encyclopædia Britannica. We should take special care to meet the highest standards of an encyclopedia with these articles so as to not give an appearance of unprofessionality.

If you wish to add articles to this list, a broad consensus amongst contributors has identified two main guidelines. If the article in question meets one or both of these categories then it could possibly be deemed "unusual"

1. The article is something you would not expect to find in a standard encyclopedia.
2. The article contains some form of juxtaposition that most people would find unusual. eg Killer Cockroach, Henry VIII in Space, edible computers.

Note that this is a broad definition. Some articles may still be considered "unusual" even if they don't fit the guidelines above.

For unusual contributions that are not so valuable, see Wikipedia:Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense.

History

• 0 (year) - Was there a year between 1 BC and 1 AD?
• Bat bomb - World War II plan to bomb Japan with bats carrying tiny Incendiary bombs.
• Boston Molasses Disaster - Twenty-one people die when a confectionery factory explodes, sending a wave of molasses down the streets of Boston.
• Chauchat - The worst machine gun ever invented.
• Crushing by elephant - An unusual form of capital punishment used throughout history.
• Douglas Corrigan - A pilot who made such a grave navigational error that, after taking off from New York, he landed in Ireland instead of Los Angeles.
• Dymaxion car - 1933, 3 wheels, 20ft long, 11 passengers, 120mph and a steering wheel that turned the car in the opposite direction.
• Emperor Norton - The man who claimed to be "Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico" in 1859.
• February 30 - Throughout history, some nations had 30 days in February.
• Football War - A 6 day war fought between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969 over a game of football (soccer).
• The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women - A 1558 diatribe by John Knox against Mary, Queen of Scots and Mary Tudor.
• History of elephants in Europe - It wasn't just Hannibal.
• Hitler has only got one ball - Was the führer only half a man?
• Heribert Illig - Apparently it is not the year 2005: it is actually 1708.
• Jack Black - Queen Victoria's officially appointed rat-catcher and mole destroyer.
• Moresnet - A European nation that disappeared in 1919.
• Le Pétomane - A French entertainer famous in Victorian times for breaking wind at will.
• Pornocracy - A term that is used to describe a government that is controlled by prostitutes.
• Sealand - A micronation located six miles (10 km) off the coast of Suffolk, England, with a population that rarely exceeds five.
• Sedlec ossuary - A Christian chapel decorated by the bones of approximately 40,000 people.
• Spittoon - An article of furniture made for spitting into, especially by users of chewing tobacco.
• Timothy (tortoise) - A tortoise that was present during the bombardment of Sevastapol during the Crimean War in 1854, finally dying in 2004.

Language and names

• Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 - A name given to a Swedish child by his parents in May 1996 (and pronounced as "Albin").
• Buckethead - The stage name of a heavy metal guitarist who has worked with Guns N' Roses among others. He always performs with a white mask and a KFC bucket on his head.
• Cadigan - These words occupy a syntactic space between nouns and pronouns. Examples include thingummy, thingy, and whatchamacallit.
• English as she is spoke - A Portuguese-English conversational guide or phrase book that is regarded as a classic of unintentional humour.
• Engrish - A slang term which, in its purest form, refers to poor-quality attempts by professional Japanese and other East Asian writers to create English words and phrases.
• Fnord - Disinformation or irrelevant information intending to misdirect, with the implication of a conspiracy. A popular word with followers of Discordianism.
• Daniel A. Grout - An individual whose last name has absorbed itself into the linguistic culture of Reed College.
• Heavy metal umlaut - An umlaut over letters in the name of a heavy metal band intended to give their logo a tough Germanic feel.
• Inherently funny word - Some influential comedians have long regarded certain words in the English language as being humorous because of their sound and/or connotation. eg: rutabaga.
• Jennifer 8. Lee - An actual person whose middle name is the number eight.
• List of interesting or unusual place names - from Arsenic Tubs, New Mexico to Cheesequake, New Jersey, by way of the Batman River, Punkeydoodles Corners, Frisby on the Wreake, and Splott.
• Longest word in English - Floccinaucinihilipilification and others.
• Nihilartikel - A deliberately fictitious entry in an encyclopedia or dictionary, which is intended to be more or less quickly recognized as false by the reader.
• Nucular - An intentional misspelling of the word nuclear which is usually intended to express contempt or amusement towards the commonplace pronunciation of that word.
• Optimus Prime (person) - The name of a U.S. Army Ohio National Guard firefighter.
• Pataphysical situation - There is no way this article can be explained in this sentence.
• Thursday October Christian - Son of Fletcher Christian (leader of the Mutiny on the Bounty), he changed his name when he discovered his calendar was wrong.
• Voynich manuscript - A mysterious illustrated book of unknown contents, written some 500 years ago by an anonymous author in an unidentified alphabet and unintelligible language.
• Your mom - An African American custom in which two competitors -- usually males -- go head to head in a competition of often ribald "trash talk".
• Zzyzx Road - Purported to be the lexicographically greatest (alphabetically last) street name in the world.

Science and medicine

• Acetylseryltyrosylserylisol...serine - An actual name for a chemical that is 1185 letters long.
• Alien hand syndrome - An unusual mental disorder whereby one of the sufferer's hands seems to take a life of its own.
• Apollo moon landing hoax accusations - Fake photos, slow-motion cameras and secret studios. All directed by Stanley Kubrick.
• Belly button fluff - A study proves that most fluff is blue and that women are less likely to have it.
• Booger - Slang for the partly solidified mucus from a human nose.
• Capgras delusion - Has your brother or spouse been replaced by an identical looking imposter?
• Cartoon physics - Animation allows for natural laws to be ignored for the sake of humor.
• Death erection - People who die and remain in a vertical position will have a natural pooling of their blood to their legs and waist. This causes the legs and genitalia to bloat.
• Exploding head syndrome - Some people hear a massive explosion that wakes them up after being asleep for an hour or two.
• Five second rule - If food is accidentally dropped on the ground, is it still safe to eat if you pick it up within five seconds?
• Foreign accent syndrome - A rare medical condition whereby sufferers speak their native language with a foreign accent.
• History of perpetual motion machines - People have expended wasteful amounts of energy for over 1000 years researching this concept.
• Infinite monkey theorem - An infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters will produce all possible written texts.
• Kluver-Bucy syndrome - A behavioral disorder that can produce hypersexuality, as well as exploring the world around them using their tongues and fingers.
• Mucophagy - The consumption of one's own nasal mucus
• Nose-picking
• Penis size - Scientific data on average size, racial variations, surgical enlargement and myths
• Phineas Gage - A 19th century man who survived a traumatic brain injury and became an important figure in the development of Neuroscience
• Photic sneeze reflex - People who sneeze when suddenly exposed to bright light
• Polywater - Cold war scientists in Russia create a polymer out of water.
• Project Mohole - A 1961 attempt to drill through the Earth's crust.
• Quantum immortality - An infinite amount of parallel universes means that any one person will always live forever.
• Smoot - A unit of distance used to measure the Harvard Bridge
• Sokal Affair - A famous hoax played by physicist Alan Sokal on the postmodernist humanities academics world.
• Squaring the circle - It is impossible for a person, using only ruler-and-compass constructions, to construct a square with the same area as a given circle. This problem occupied mathematicians for centuries.
• Spontaneous human combustion - The burning of a person's body without any apparent source of ignition
• Sterile Atomic Fly - The United Nations solution to fighting Sleeping sickness in Africa.
• Tacoma Narrows Bridge - A mile long suspension bridge in Washington State that was destroyed by wind.
• Tin-foil hat - Headgear that allegedly prevents a person from having their minds read or controlled.
• Trepanation - A form of surgery where a hole is drilled or scraped into the skull. It was thought that such a procedure could cure problems like epilepsy or allow a person to enter into a higher state of conciousness.
• Trichotillomania - An impulse control disorder characterised by the repeated urge to pull out scalp hair, eyelashes, eyebrows or other body hair.
• Triskaidekaphobia - Fear of the number 13.
• Turtles all the way down - A myth about the nature of the universe.
• Ulam spiral - A bored mathematician discovers an unusual numerical pattern while doodling
• Unibrow - The presence of hair between the eyebrows (sometimes called a monobrow)
• Weasel war dance - The behavior of extremely excited ferrets who are enjoying themselves too much
• Will Rogers phenomenon - Also known as the Will Rogers paradox; the apparent paradox obtained when moving an element from one set to another set that raises the average values of both sets.

Popular culture

General

• Alice B. Toklas brownie - A "magic" cookie containing cannabis.
• Caganer - A traditional Spanish statue (similar to a garden gnome) that depicts a person defecating.
• Cow tipping - The act of pushing over sleeping cows.
• Dick Assman (pronounced OSS-man) - A Saskatchewan service station owner whose name propelled him to international celebrity status in 1995.
• Dwarf tossing - A humorous sporting competition where well-padded dwarfs are thrown by competitors.
• Earworm - A term used for an annoying song that a person cannot get out of their head.
• Eddie 'the Eagle' Edwards - A British sportsman famous for coming last in the 1988 Winter Olympics ski-jump competition.
• Elvis sightings - There are many who still believe.
• Evil clown - A recent development in American popular culture in which the playful trope of the clown is rendered as disturbing through the use of dark humor and horror elements.
• Exploding sheep - A meme most commonly found in American and British computer games.
• Exploding whale - Real whales exploded in Oregon in 1970 and Taiwan in 2004.
• Extreme ironing - A sport whereby participants take an ironing board to a remote location and iron a few items of clothing.
• Homokaasu - "Gay gas" - mysterious chemical substance conspiracy theory.
• How to keep an idiot busy - No description of article yet. Please return in five minutes.
• Jackalope - A ficticious cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope.
• Japanese toilet - The most advanced toilets in the world with computers, nozzles and flashing lights.
• Lighting farts - The act of igniting gases produced by human flatulence.
• Lin Wang - A Taiwanese elephant made famous for his participation in the Sino-Japanese War.
• McDonald's urban legends - Is that worm meat in your Big Mac?
• McWords - Words created in popular culture as a result of the influence of McDonald's Restaurants, e.g. McJob or McMansion.
• Matthew Brimson - English Cricketer made famous for a deliberate wardrobe malfunction.
• Meta-joke - A joke that refers to itself as the joke.
• Metrophile - A person who loves underground railway systems.
• Mexican Perforation - A French artistic movement that expresses itself in underground places.
• Mike the Headless Chicken - A Rooster that lived for 18 months with its head cut off.
• Mooning - The act of exposing one's bare buttocks.
• Mr. Potato Head - A popular children's doll, consisting of a plastic model of a potato.
• No soap radio - A prank joke intended to fool one of its listeners into believing that it is a joke.
• Octopus card - Hong Kong smart card e-cash wonder
• Page Three girl - A woman who poses for topless photographs published in UK tabloid newspapers.
• Penis panic - A colloquial term referring to a type of mass hysteria or panic where males grow fearful of removal or shrinking of the penis.
• "Shit happens" - A common slang phrase, used as a simple existential observation that life is full of imperfections.
• Shoe flinging - The practice of throwing footwear, whether for humorous or political purposes.
• Sonya Thomas - A slightly-built Korean-American competitive eater. She has consumed 32 hot dogs in 12 minutes (a female record) and holds a host of other eating records.
• Space burial - Around 150 people have had their remains interred in space.
• Toilet humour - Humor based upon bodily functions.
• Toynbee tiles - Mysterious tiles that are found embedded in ashphalt in the United States. The tiles contain a cryptic message.
• Treacle mining - The ficticious mining of treacle (molasses) in a raw form similar to coal.
• Wilhelm scream - A stock sound effect first recorded in 1951 and used in dozens of films (including Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings and Kill Bill).
• You are X and I claim my five pounds - A British stock phrase commonly used in online discussion forums such as Usenet.
• You have two cows - The beginning phrase for a series of political joke definitions.

Legends and mythology

• Machine Elves - The entities that people claim they become aware of after having taken tryptamine based psychedelic drugs such as DMT.
• Reptilian humanoid - A recurring theme in mythology, fiction, and especially science fiction, fringe theories, and conspiracy theories.
• Sidehill Gouger - Fictional creatures said to inhabit the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia and the southwestern sandhills of Saskatchewan - spoken of to confuse the gullible.
• Vampire watermelon - A folk legend from the Balkan peninsula of south-eastern Europe based upon the idea that any inanimate object left outside during the night of a full moon will become a vampire.
• Vril - A belief that aliens controlled Nazi Germany and helped Hitler and others to escape to the South Pole when the war was lost.

Entertainment and media

• "Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" (song) - A song sung by Big Bird of Sesame Street where he tries to discern the meaning of a very long word (which is actually the alphabet). (This is not an article about the other, more popular, alphabet song.)
• Alternative 3 - An April Fools joke by an ITV science show leads many to believe that scientists were being kidnapped to prepare for the colonization of Mars.
• Amish episode - A stereotypical episode of an American or Canadian Science Fiction or Horror television series that centers around the Amish or people meant to represent the Amish.
• Bert is Evil - A popular humour website that depicts the Muppet character in various photoshopped images alongside Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, and others.
• The Canadian Conspiracy - A mockumentary released in 1985 that asserts that Canada is subverting the United States by taking over its media.
• Chewbacca Defense - A satirical term for any legal strategy that seeks to overwhelm its audience with nonsensical arguments.
• The Clan McDuck - A fictional family in the style of a Scottish clan, from which a great number of Walt Disney Company's comic book characters held their origin.
• Early American editions of The Hobbit - Now collectors items because of their printing differences.
• Endorian Holocaust - Did the debris of the Death Star result in catastrophe for the friendly Ewoks?
• The Eye of Argon - An infamously bad heroic fantasy novella, written in 1970 by Jim Theis and circulated anonymously in science fiction fandom since then.
• The Funniest Joke in the World - A Monty Python Sketch depicting the writing of a joke so funny that people die within seconds of hearing it.
• Gadsby - A 50,100-word long notoriously lipogrammatic book, from 1939.
• Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead - An early catch phrase used on Saturday Night Live, based upon the dictator's lengthy death.
• Hammerspace - An extra-dimensional storage area used to explain how cartoon or anime characters can sometimes produce objects seemingly out of thin air.
• Hollywood (Mannequin character) - A fictional character played by Meshach Taylor in the 1987 movie Mannequin.
• Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch - A fictional weapon depicted in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It is an ancient Christian artifact that explodes when its pin is pulled out. Its humour is derived from its anachronistic juxtaposition.
• Jumping the shark - Metaphor for the point at which one can speak of a TV show as having had its best days behind it.
• Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den - A poem written by a Chinese poet in Classical Chinese. It can be comprehended and understood by all who understand the language, despite the fact that it consists entirely of the word "shi" repeated 92 times in different tones. Also known as "Shī Shì shí shī shǐ".
• Michael Larson - A man who won over $100,000 in an American Quiz show because he was able to notice a pattern in the flashing lights on the "Big Board"
• The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World - A movie that runs for 48 hours.
• Manscaping - A shorthand for "landscaping" the male body, by shaving, trimming, waxing, or brushing the body hair, usually in an artful manner aimed at presenting that body in the best light possible.
• Tooth Fairy Rule - Rule of thumb for writing science fiction.
• Turn-On - An ABC comedy series that was cancelled and taken off the air even before the first episode had finished.
• Le Train de Nulle Part - A French novel, 233 pages long, written without verbs.
• William Shatner's version of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" - Regularly wins radio station competitions to find the "worst music of all time".
• Where's the beef? - A stock phrase synonymous with "Where's the substance?".
• Who ate all the pies? - A chant sung by football fans in England and Scotland, aimed at supposedly overweight footballers, officials or opposing supporters.

Politics and ideology

• 51st state - A phrase used to describe potential additions to the United States of America. It is often used satirically to deride any nation that is considered to be "too friendly" with America.
• Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions - An Australian group of subversive artists who deface Tobacco and Alcohol billboard advertisements in order to promote healthy living.
• Evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet - A pejorative term used by a Canadian politician to belittle a rival in 2003.
• Galambosianism - A short-lived doctrine of intellectual property absolutism, founded in the 1960s by Joseph Andrew Galambos, and descended from libertarianism and/or the teachings of Ayn Rand.
• I Am Not Canadian - A parody of the Canadian television commercial, I Am Canadian, devised by a Toronto radio station and focusing upon French speakers from Quebec.
• Ich bin ein Berliner - President Kennedy did not actually call himself a jelly donut in front of a German audience.
• McGillicuddy Serious Party - A satirical political party in New Zealand.
• Marijuana Party of Canada - A Canadian federal political party whose platform is to end prohibition of cannabis.
• Official Monster Raving Loony Party - A British political party which does exactly what it says on the tin.
• Rhinoceros Party of Canada - A registered political party in Canada, which often promised outlandishly impossible schemes designed to amuse and entertain the voting public.
• Satanism and Pokémon - Fundamentalist Christian groups often believe that Satanism is widely present in the popular video game series by Nintendo.
• The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence - An organization of mostly gay men who dress as nuns, often on rollerskates.
• You forgot Poland - A quote by President George W. Bush of the United States made during the first presidential election debate on September 30, 2004.
• Let's trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle - A television show produced by the communist government of North Korea intended to educate the public on good and bad hairstyles.

Religion and spirituality

• Cadaver Synod - In 897, Pope Stephen VII dug up the body of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, dressed the body in papal vestments and seated him on a throne while Pope Stephen read charges against him and conducted a trial.
• Holy Prepuce - One of several relics purported to be associated with Jesus Christ. Also known as The Holy Foreskin.
• Invisible Pink Unicorn - A satire aimed at theistic beliefs. The satire consists of a goddess in the form of a unicorn that is paradoxically both invisible and pink.
• Pope Michael - Elected Pope in 1990 by a group of Conclavist or post-Sedevacantist Catholics to fill the vacancy they consider to have been caused by the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958.
• Timeline of unfulfilled Christian Prophecy - A record of events that were prophesised by leaders in the Christian church which never came to pass.
• Ussher-Lightfoot Calendar - A 17th century Irish Bishop discovers the exact day, date and time of creation.
• Xenu - An ancient interstellar genocide which created Christianity and psychiatry and is "calculated to kill (by pneumonia etc) anyone who attempts to solve it."

Computers and internet

• 165 University Avenue - A small rented office building on University Avenue, the main commercial street in Palo Alto, California. Both Google and Paypal started there, among others.
• All your base are belong to us - An Engrish phrase that originated in a 1989 Computer Game, and sparked an internet phenomenon in 2001 and 2002.
• Archimedes Plutonium - An eccentric Usenet contributor who claims that the universe is a giant plutonium atom. He repeatedly claims to be the greatest living scientist.
• Badger Badger Badger- A Macromedia Flash animation consisting mainly of images of badgers doing calisthenics, a mushroom in front of a tree and a snake in the desert.
• Blinkenlights - DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN!
• The Book of Mozilla - A well-known computer Easter egg found in the Netscape and Mozilla series of browsers.
• Boss key - A special key or key combination used in computer games to quickly hide the game from superiors or coworkers.
• The computers take over - A science-fiction scenario in which a supercomputer becomes intelligent and views humans as a threat to its safety. The computer will then try to wipe out the human race, or at least take control of it. Examples include The Terminator and The Matrix, among others.
• The Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science - A 1990 academic paper which argues that computer programming should be understood as a branch of mathematics, and that the formal provability of a program is a major criterion for correctness.
• Esoteric programming language - Refers to programming languages designed as a test of the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, or as jokes, and not with the intention of being adopted for real-world programming.
• E.T. (video game) - A notoriously poor video game made for the Atari 2600. Most are now landfill.
• Gay Nigger Association of America - An Internet troll organization that primarily targets Internet communities in an effort to disrupt their normal activities and annoy their users.
• JFK: Reloaded - A video game released in 2004 where the player gets to assassinate president John F. Kennedy.
• John Titor - The name of a purported time traveller from the year 2036. He posted on several time travel-related Internet bulletin boards during 2000/2001.
• Mark V Shaney - A fake Usenet user whose computer-generated postings were created using Markov chain techniques.
• Meow Wars - Perhaps the largest and longest-lasting flame war in the history of the internet.
• Office Assistant - Microsoft's anthropomorphic paperclip that pops up in Word 97.
• OS-tan - A small internet phenomenon where certain types of software (including various Microsoft and Linux operating systems) are depicted as young Japanese women.
• Prime Number Shitting Bear - A Javascript web animation showing a cartoon bear producing prime numbers from its anus.
• Pwn - A term used by the Internet gaming subculture which means to beat or dominate an opponent.
• Time Cube - A concept postulating that time is cubic, not linear, and that there are four simultaneous days in a single rotation of Earth.
• Trojan room coffee pot - The world's first webcam was pointed at the Trojan room coffee pot at the computer science department of Cambridge University.
• Utah teapot - A 3D model which has become a standard reference object (and something of an in joke) in the computer graphics community.
• Year 10,000 problem - The collective name for all potential software bugs that will emerge as the need to express years with five digits arises. In the months leading up to the beginning of the year 2000, the year 10,000 problem was given somewhat humorous exposure by people in the media.

Other miscellany

• Bread clip - A device used to hold plastic bags (usually those containing sliced bread) closed.
• Blood circle - Used as part of Boy Scout terminology. When using a knife or axe it is the area within the radius of the arm and blade length combined.
• Can't sleep, clown'll eat me -