Mental Floss

WEIRD

Taco Bell

No matter what your opinion is on the waffle taco, one thing's for sure: It’s not the weirdest fast food to ever cross a counter. Here are 11 other fast food oddities that chains once tried out—but a little warning to Taco Bell: none of them lasted long.

Stacy Conradt




Thinkstock

Most people’s fundraising experience ends at running a race for charity or selling candy for a good cause—but if you really want to go big with your efforts, you need to think outside of the box. Here are a few of the weirdest charity stunts ever performe

Jill Harness




Wikimedia Commons/Thinkstock/Bryan Dugan

Summer's here, and for many of us that means the season of squirt guns and Super Soakers is upon us. But this American pastime goes back much further than most of us realize, for these beloved water pistols have enjoyed a long history predating even the C

Mark Mancini
Playwright Tennessee Williams.

President Zachary Taylor died after eating iced milk and cherries. He's hardly the first person—or the last—to meet his or her demise from eating or swallowing something suspicious. Here are 10 others.

Stacy Conradt
Getty Images

From presidential kisses to witchcraft to events that may or may not have actually even occurred, plaques are rich and often underestimated sources of history that’s weird, funny, or just plain creepy.

Maureen Monahan








SIphotography/iStock via Getty Images

First reported in the 1700s, the mental disorder where people suffer the nihilistic delusion that they are dead or no longer exist, that's also called "Walking Corpse Syndrome" is still a mystery.

Matt Soniak
New Scientist

Know someone who still thinks science is boring? Tell them to get a load of these five phenomena, which prove science can be as painfully poetic as a ghost falling in love with a cirrus cloud.

Maggie Ryan Sandford


Library of Congress

Take comfort that time has swept away many horrible, dangerous, and stinky occupations. Here are seven jobs in which redundancy is a relief.

Therese Oneill




Google Patents

We may think of the inability to get or maintain an erection as a problem reserved for the ruggedly handsome 50-year-old millionaires joyously piloting their yachts in the background of Viagra commercials. But there has never been a time or place where me

Therese Oneill


Getty Images

Although the sideshow has mostly disappeared from the American landscape today, we can still look back on the performers of yesteryear and see how they became the icons of the American circus culture. But the stories of the real-life people behind the leg

M Asher Cantrell

The United States Marines have their bulldogs and the Army has their mules, but the Norwegian Royal Guard has a mascot a little more accustomed to colder temperatures: Nils Olav, a King Penguin who is also a Colonel-in-Chief and a knight.

Roma Panganiban