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820 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 8 of 14.

421. George Sand needed a police permit to wear trousers in ParisIn 1831 a young baroness named Aurore Dupin applied to the Paris police for permission to dress as a man, arguing that trousers were cheaper and tougher than a noblewoman's gown. …
422. Girls' Generation turned years of trainee grind into a K-pop landmarkBefore Girls' Generation ever stepped on stage, one member had sat through about 200 auditions and another had trained for five years, left for a rival agency and been recruited b…
423. Giselle grew from a poet's idea that vengeful ghost brides would make a pretty balletThéophile Gautier read a passage by Heinrich Heine about the Wilis, spirits of brides who died before their weddings and rise at midnight to dance any passing young man to death. …
424. Gongs once told Chinese officials on the road who had to bow firstIn imperial China, a procession escorting an official was preceded by a gong, and the count of strokes signalled rank. Two dignitaries approaching each other could tell, before th…
425. Brazil's favelas are named after a stinging shrub from a distant battlefieldIn the late 1800s, soldiers returning from the Canudos War in Bahia found no housing in Rio de Janeiro and settled on a hill in the city centre. They nicknamed it after Favela Hil…
426. The Stratocaster's curves were designed for comfort, and they became the industry standardIn 1954 most solid-body electric guitars were flat slabs with squared edges. Fender's new Stratocaster had a sculpted back that hugged the player's ribs, a stretched upper horn fo…
427. The drum kit exists because theatre pit orchestras could not afford several percussionistsMilitary bands and orchestras once needed a separate player for every drum and cymbal. Cash-strapped theatre pits could not pay for that, so drummers rigged pedals, stands and tra…
428. The earliest Germanic dwarfs were not necessarily short, and dwarves was Tolkien's grammar slipPicture a dwarf and you probably see a short, bearded miner. The oldest Germanic sources never clearly say dwarfs were small; they were supernatural craftsmen living in rocks and …
429. A normal EEG cannot rule out epilepsy, and an abnormal one can misleadElectrodes on the scalp can catch the brain's electrical chatter within milliseconds, faster than any MRI or CT scanner. Yet a standard half-hour recording misses the telltale sig…
430. Epic Mickey reunited Mickey with the rabbit Disney lost to UniversalBefore Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, but Universal Pictures owned him. Disney only won the character back in 2006. Four years later, a W…
431. The euphonium's name means sweet-voiced, but Americans kept calling it a baritoneThe euphonium takes its name from a Greek word for pleasant-sounding, and its warm tenor voice is a brass band staple. Yet in the United States it spent a century being confused w…
432. Fantasia 2000 was the first major Hollywood feature released in IMAX, and still floppedSix decades after the original Fantasia, Disney finally delivered a sequel after many false starts, with flying humpback whales, Gershwin's New York and Donald Duck on Noah's Ark.…
433. Joseph Gordon-Levitt ignored Christopher Nolan's warning and directed himself in Don JonChristopher Nolan cautioned Joseph Gordon-Levitt against both starring in and directing his first feature. Gordon-Levitt did it anyway. Don Jon, a comedy-drama about a New Jersey …
434. Don Juan was invented as a sermon against leaving repentance until laterThe original Don Juan was not meant to be admired. A Spanish friar writing around 1630 created the seducer to scare young people who assumed a deathbed confession would wipe their…
435. Nobody agrees who actually played the cowbell on Don't Fear the ReaperThe cowbell on Blue Oyster Cult's biggest hit became so famous that Saturday Night Live built a whole sketch around it. Yet the people in the studio cannot agree on who played it.…
436. Play only the white keys from D to D and you hear the Dorian modeStart on D, play every white piano key up to the next D, and you have the modern Dorian mode: a minor-sounding scale with one surprisingly bright note. That raised sixth gives Mil…
437. Bela Lugosi won the role of Dracula by accepting a tiny salaryUniversal did not want Bela Lugosi. The studio hoped for Conrad Veidt, then Lon Chaney, then a string of established screen actors. Lugosi, who had played the count on Broadway an…
438. Fate, destiny, fortune and determinism are four different ideas, not onePeople use fate and destiny interchangeably, but philosophers pull them apart. Fate is a future no choice can change. Destiny looks at the present, the place your own decisions ha…
439. Wagner wrote his Valkyrie story third but placed it second in the RingRichard Wagner planned his Ring cycle backwards. He began with the hero's death, then kept adding earlier chapters to explain it, so Die Walkure, the Valkyrie, was the third libre…
440. Digital Underground's cartoonish funk launched Tupac Shakur as a backup dancerBefore he became one of rap's biggest names, Tupac Shakur was a dancer and hype man for an Oakland group whose leader rapped as a big-nosed alter ego called Humpty Hump. Digital U…
441. The disc jockey began as a radio host and became a musicianThe phrase disc jockey was supposedly coined in 1935 by the gossip columnist Walter Winchell to describe a radio host who introduced records on air. The disc was shellac, later vi…
442. Commercial flops that devoted fans later turned into cult classicsThe Velvet Underground's first album flopped in 1967 because radio and shops found it too controversial to sell. Critics and loyal listeners slowly rescued it. That pattern, a fai…
443. A snide review of a failed indie band gave Daft Punk their nameThomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo first played in a short-lived trio called Darlin', which a Melody Maker critic dismissed as a daft punky thrash. They found it fun…
444. Damascus steel was named for a market town that probably never smelted itThe rippling blades sold in Damascus were mostly forged from wootz ingots shipped in from southern India, and the city itself shows no trace of making crucible steel. The name may…
445. Daniel Barenboim argues tempo should come from harmony, not the composer's metronomeDaniel Barenboim gave his first formal recital in Buenos Aires aged seven and went on to lead orchestras in Paris, Chicago, Milan and Berlin. He plays Bach with the sustaining ped…
446. Rejected from his school orchestra, Danny Elfman went on to score over 100 filmsAs a boy Danny Elfman was turned away from his elementary school orchestra for showing no feel for music. Years later, with no formal training, he wrote the Batman score, the Simp…
447. David Hasselhoff bought back Baywatch with his own money and made it a global hitNBC dropped Baywatch after one season. David Hasselhoff was convinced it could work, so he poured in his own money, produced it for syndication and negotiated rerun royalties. The…
448. Dear Evan Hansen grew from a therapy exercise into a six-Tony musicalEvan Hansen's therapist asks him to write himself daily letters explaining why today will be good. When one of those letters is mistaken for a message from a classmate who has die…
449. In 2004 every Billboard number one came from African-American artistsContemporary R&B grew out of 1970s soul, softened disco's pulse, borrowed hip-hop's beats and became, for a stretch of the early 2000s, simply what pop music was. Its defining tra…
450. The lowest classical female voice keeps getting cast as witches and boysContraltos hold the deepest range among classical female voices, stretching roughly from the F below middle C to the F two octaves up. Real operatic contraltos are scarce, and com…
451. The English horn is neither English nor a hornThe cor anglais is really an alto oboe, about half as long again as its better-known sibling and prized for a mellow, plaintive voice. Its misleading name probably comes from a me…
452. Before the trumpet took over, the cornet was the brass section's melody starThe cornet looks like a squashed trumpet and plays the same notes, yet its tubing widens steadily from mouthpiece to bell, giving a warmer, rounder tone. For about a century it ca…
453. Countertenors now sing the opera roles once written for castratiA countertenor talks in an ordinary tenor or baritone voice, then sings in the range of a contralto or mezzo-soprano. For two centuries the voice nearly vanished from public view,…
454. Cover versions began as copycat records rushed out to beat the originalToday a cover usually means a tribute, but the term began as something more cutthroat. Record labels once hurried out their own version of a new hit to compete head-on with the or…
455. Cremona, home of Stradivari, once hung an enemy army's trousers in its cathedralCremona is famous for violins by Stradivari, Guarneri and the Amati family. Its medieval citizens had a rougher sense of pride: after beating Parma's army and capturing its ceremo…
456. Byzantine emperor Constantine V was nicknamed Dung-Named by the people who wrote his historyConstantine V ruled Byzantium for 34 years, secured its frontiers and reformed its army. Yet later chroniclers remembered him chiefly as Kopronymos, the Dung-Named, spreading a st…
457. Three symbols, fifteen positions, and why violists read a different clefA clef is the curly symbol at the start of a staff that tells you which note sits on which line. Modern music uses just three shapes, the G, F and C clefs, but slide them up and d…
458. Yes built Close to the Edge by committee, and nearly lost a take to the cleanersYes's 1972 album Close to the Edge holds only three tracks, one of them an 18-minute suite inspired by Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. Every short passage was debated and voted on, th…
459. The oldest surviving name in recorded sound started out selling Edison's machinesColumbia Records began on January 15, 1889, as a local dealer for Edison phonographs in Washington, D.C., named after the District of Columbia. It is now the oldest surviving bran…
460. The pirate squeezebox that no pirate ever playedFilms love to hand a concertina to a sea shanty-singing pirate, but the instrument was invented around a century after the Golden Age of Piracy. It appeared almost simultaneously …
461. Before the baton, orchestras kept time by banging a staff on the floorThe standalone conductor waving a baton is younger than you might think. For centuries ensembles were led by a harpsichordist or the first violinist, or by someone thumping out th…
462. The heavenly keyboard behind the Sugar Plum Fairy, Hedwig's Theme and Pure ImaginationThe celesta looks like a small upright piano, but its hammers strike steel bars over wooden resonators, giving a soft bell-like shimmer. Its name comes from the French for heavenl…
463. Cher has scored a number-one single in seven decades runningNo other solo act has topped a US Billboard chart in each of seven decades in a row, from the 1960s through the 2020s, as Cher has. Nobody else holds both an acting Oscar and a pl…
464. A pizza parlour bluegrass night launched Chris Thile's mandolin career at age eightAs a toddler, Chris Thile sat in a Carlsbad, California pizza place listening to a weekly bluegrass band. By five he was playing mandolin, by eight he had formed Nickel Creek with…
465. The Twist topped the charts twice, and its singer wished it hadn'tChubby Checker's cover of The Twist hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1960, then did it again in a separate run in late 1961, this time powered by adults. In 2008 Billboa…
466. Before he was Bruno Mars, he was Honolulu's four-year-old Little ElvisAt four, Peter Hernandez was playing five nights a week with his family's band in Waikiki, famous locally for his Elvis impression. His father nicknamed him Bruno after a wrestler…
467. Why some chord endings feel final and others leave you hangingEvery time a hymn closes on Amen, the harmony is doing something precise: stepping from the chord built on the fourth note of the scale back home to the first. Musicians call such…
468. Camel, the quiet prog band whose instrumental Snow Goose drew a lawsuitPaul Gallico, author of The Snow Goose, sued a Guildford rock band over their wordless concept album based on his story. Legend says he hated smoking and confused Camel with the c…
469. Saint-Saëns, the prodigy Berlioz said knew everything but lacked inexperienceBefore turning three, Camille Saint-Saëns had perfect pitch and was picking out tunes on the piano. One critic later ranked him an even more remarkable child prodigy than Mozart. …
470. C. P. E. Bach, the son who carried keyboard music from Baroque to ClassicalHaydn and Beethoven both swore by a keyboard manual written by Johann Sebastian Bach's second surviving son. Known to friends simply as Emanuel, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach spent th…
471. How Rodgers and Hammerstein moved a Budapest tragedy to the Maine coastAfter Oklahoma!, the film mogul Samuel Goldwyn joked that Richard Rodgers might as well give up, since he would never top it. Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein answered with Carousel,…
472. Bosley Crowther championed Fellini and Bergman, then lost his job over Bonnie and ClydeFor 27 years Bosley Crowther's verdicts in The New York Times could lift or sink a film. He helped American audiences discover Rossellini, De Sica, Bergman and Fellini, called God…
473. Braunschweig, the lion city where Faust first reached the stageA bronze lion put up by Henry the Lion in the twelfth century still stands in front of Dankwarderode Castle and serves as Braunschweig's emblem. The Lower Saxony city, once a Hans…
474. A Cuban love-song style travelled from Santiago's guitars all the way to VietnamThe bolero was born among wandering guitar-playing troubadours in Santiago de Cuba, and its founding composer never wrote his songs down. It became Latin America's great romantic …
475. Dropped by her label, sober and nearly forgotten, Bonnie Raitt won Album of the YearIn 1983 Warner Brothers dropped Bonnie Raitt the day after she finished mastering an album, then shelved it. She was fighting alcohol and drugs and touring on her savings. Six yea…
476. Before politics, Boris Johnson was sacked from The Times for inventing a quotationLong before he became prime minister, a young graduate trainee at The Times wrote about the discovery of Edward II's palace and put invented words in the mouth of a historian, who…
477. Billboard began as a trade paper for poster hangers and circus peopleThe magazine behind the Hot 100 started in Cincinnati in 1894 as Billboard Advertising, eight pages for the men who pasted up bills. For years it covered circuses, fairs and burle…
478. Billie Eilish's first hit was a song her brother wrote for a dance classIn 2015 Billie Eilish's dance teacher asked for a song to choreograph. Her older brother Finneas handed over Ocean Eyes, written for his own band, and the siblings posted it on So…
479. Blackpink's name means pretty isn't everything, and the label nearly launched nine membersYG Entertainment spent six years auditioning preteens and teenagers worldwide before unveiling a new girl group in 2016. The plan had been nine members; the label settled on four,…
480. Blaxploitation put Black heroes at the centre of the screen, then split its audienceIn the early 1970s a wave of cheap, bold action films finally made Black characters the heroes rather than the sidekicks or victims. Their funk soundtracks and fearless heroines s…

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