Get Cynical

In July 1917, two young girls claimed to have taken photographs of real life fairies at the bottom of their garden. When the genius behind the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, presented the pictures to the public as evidence of the existence of fairies, the tale of the two little girls in Cottingley was immortalised.

Like a pebble dropped into the middle of a pond, the Cottingley tale travelled across the globe and onto the lips of millions. Every few years, the story is resurrected and once again enchants a generation.

Army worm wine: In 2001, Ray Reigstad, an amateur wine maker in Northern Minnesota, decided to brew up 11-gallons of white wine. Northern Minnesota is not particularly known for its wine grapes, but that didn’t matter to Reigstad, as he wasn’t planning to use grapes anyway. Instead, he planned to use something that already grew in abundance in the Northland: the forest tent caterpillar, commonly called the army worm. Reigstad had heard about the recipe from a coworker who claimed his grandfather made it, and the winemaker saw a peculiar logic in using the insects as an ingredient for winemaking. “Army worms eat leaves,” he told the Duluth News Tribune. “So essentially they’re a combination of fruit and flowers.”