The Wikipedia journey started at French Guiana, because French Guiana is one of the very few places in the Americas where no one has ever visited TedQuarters. It finished with one of the most fascinating Wikipedia pages I’ve ever stumbled upon.

From the Wikipedia: Sentinelese people

The Sentinelese are an isolated tribe of roughly a couple hundred people who love coconuts and hate everybody. They reside on North Sentinel Island, one of the most remote islands in the Andaman chain, separated from its nearest neighbor by some 20 miles’ worth of the Bay of Bengal.

The Sentinelese are believed to have arrived in the Andamans as part of the first migration of human beings out of Africa about 60,000 years ago, via a land bridge during a glacial period. Based on what little we know of them today, they appear to largely maintain the same lifestyle they did during the Paleolithic Era, spearfishing, gathering fruit, and hunting local pigs for food. Stone-age stuff.

The Sentinelese were one of a group of five tribes found on the Andamans by European explorers in the 18th century. The other four, all native to larger Andaman Islands, were largely wiped out or dispersed by colonial aggression and disease. The Sentinelese still control the same territory they did over 300 years ago. Officially, the Indian government claims North Sentinel Island as part of its Andaman and Nicobar Islands Union Territory, but since no treaty has ever been made with the Sentinelese people, the island is a de facto autonomous region. As of 2005, local Indian administrators stated that they have no intention to interfere with the Sentinelese and will make no further efforts to contact them.

Part of that is because the Sentinelese kill or try to kill nearly everyone that comes close. The photograph above is typical of several of those we have of the tribesmen, showing them raising bows toward a possible intruder. It is the product of an incident in 2006 during which the Sentinelese killed two fishermen who got drunk, passed out, and drifted into their waters. When a helicopter hovered over the island to try to recover the bodies, the Sentinelese  showered it with arrows. They are considered expert marksman, and are known to have at least three different types of arrows — one for hunting, one for fishing, and one for firing warning shots at intruders.

Most outside interactions with the Sentinelese have started and ended with violence. In 1867, a merchant ship wrecked on the island and the 106 survivors had to fend off Sentinelese attacks until the Royal Navy could rescue them. In 1981, a ship wrecked on the coral reef near the island and its captain radioed for an urgent airdrop of firearms, reporting tribesmen with spears building boats on the beach until the ship’s crew was finally rescued by helicopter. In 2004, an Indian government helicopter sent to survey the island for damage after the Tsunami that ravaged most of the area determined that the Sentinelese were still apparently healthy enough to greet the aircraft with rocks and arrows.

You could read all that and conclude that the Sentinelese are total a-holes, but their instincts might actually be reasonable. The Jarawa people of a neighboring Andaman island have recently started making contact with outsiders, only to be riddled with diseases for which they have no natural immunity and, to boot, gawked at and exploited by tourists.

Almost everything we know about the Sentinelese comes from Indian anthropologist Trilokinath Pandit, the only outsider known to have made friendly contact with the Sentinelese — and only after some 25 years spent buttering them up.

Starting in 1967, Pandit began visiting the island every few years, often bearing gifts — coconuts, fish, toys, pots and pans, and pigs tethered on the beach. In 1974, Pandit brought a documentarian with him to attempt to film the Sentinelese, but the Sentinelese shot the filmmaker in the thigh with an arrow. Until 1991, Pandit continued attempting contact and being rebuffed — sometimes violently, sometimes insultingly. He reported: “Sometimes they would turn their backs to us and sit on their haunches as if to defecate. This was meant to insult us and to say we were not welcome.”

Finally, on Jan. 4, 1991, after years and years of free coconuts — and the Sentinelese love coconuts, which do not grow on their island but sometimes wash up on shore — Pandit arrived on the shore of North Sentinel Island to be met by a group of 28 unarmed Sentinelese.

Welcome on the island, Pandit began learning their habits and customs, but not before he got naked first. The Sentinelese preferred he and his team take off their clothes, watches and glasses before making contact. Once stripped, Pandit learned that the Sentinelese live without a chief or government in huts or large communal dwellings, can fashion weapons and tools from scrap metal they’ve found or pilfered from area shipwrecks, and are very protective of fire, which they can control from embers in lightning-struck trees but can not make on their own.

Also, the anthropologists learned to practice the traditional Sentinelese greeting, “which is to sit in a friend’s lap and slap your right buttock vigorously.” I very much hope that’s not the traditional greeting, and the Sentinelese were just messing with Pandit’s team. “Hey guys — let’s convince these idiots to smack their own asses. And DO NOT tell them about the KFC franchise we’re operating on the other side of the island.”

That’s about all I’ve learned about the Sentinelese over the past two days of vigorous Wikipedia research. You can try to go there and find out more, but they’ll probably kill you.

Also, in Googling Pandit I learned that our man Dan Lewis covered the Sentinelese in his Now I Know newsletter last year. I missed that one until now, but it’s worth checking out.

I have no idea why.

From the Wikipedia: Pop Goes the Weasel.

“Pop Goes the Weasel” is a common children’s song, numbered 5249 in the Roud Folk Song Index. The lyrics of the version I grew up with are as follows:

All around the mulberry bush
The monkey chased the weasel
The monkey thought it was all in fun
Pop! goes the weasel.

Those lyrics defy explanation. For one thing, there are not many areas of the world where monkeys, weasels and mulberry bushes coexist, and in none of them do people traditionally speak English. Mulberry trees grow all over the place: Europe, southern Asia, Central and South America, eastern North America and southern Africa, but there are no monkeys in eastern North America, unfortunately, and no weasels in southern Africa. The only non-human primates native to Europe are the Barbary apes.

Furthermore, the lone South America type of mulberry tree — morus insignis — mostly appears to exist near the Pacific coast, whereas South American weasels typically live inland.

Basically, the only places where a monkey could feasibly chase a weasel around a mulberry bush without human intervention are Mexico, parts of Panama, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru in the Western Hemisphere and China, Laos and Vietnam in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Moreover, though weasels do communicate vocally, they either gurgle or squeal or screech or purr, depending on the type of weasel and the situation, but never pop. And though a playful monkey might chase a weasel “in good fun,” it’s unlikely that monkeys ever eat weasels. In fact, tayras — a cousin to the weasel sometimes included in the larger weasel umbrella — are known to attack monkeys, so it may be more common for weasels to chase monkeys than the other way around. I know: I’m blowing your mind right now.

So the song makes no sense. But as it turns out, and somewhat predictably, the lyrics to “Pop Goes the Weasel” commonly sung in the United States are not the original ones. Our version is the remix.

The song dates back to at least the 1850s in England, but none of the known versions from that era contain references to mulberry bushes and only one verse mentions a monkey. The first time it included a monkey chasing anything, at least by the Wikipedia’s research, came in a version printed in Boston in 1858, when the monkey was chasing the people around the cobbler’s house.

It’s worth noting that the Wikipedia deems the song’s popularity on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1850s as a “dance craze.” No joke. Some 160 years ago, “Pop Goes the Weasel” was the hottest new jam at all the clubs. Newspapers called it “the latest English dance” and (inaccurately) credited it to Queen Victoria herself, and apparently started using the phrase “pop goes the weasel” as an expression outside the context of the song, like how people once claimed to be too legit to quit or, presumably, said, “c’mon, baby, do the loco-motion” to compel their friends into action at various times in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

It makes “Gangnam Style” seem palatable, really.

As it turns out, there are a variety of theories as to what “Pop Goes the Weasel” actually means, but it seems most likely it comes from Cockney rhyming slang — itself the subject of a reasonably fascinating Wikipedia page. For whatever reason, people in the East End of London have habit of “replacing a common word with a rhyming phrase of two or three words and then, in almost all cases, omitting the secondary rhyming word (which is thereafter implied), in a process called hemiteleia.” For example, the phrase “to blow a raspberry” to mean making a flatulent sound with your mouth and lips actually comes from the cockney rhyming slang for fart, “raspberry tart,” shortened to raspberry.

The Wikipedia suggests that “popping” is a cockney slang term for pawning, and weasel — from “weasel and stoat,” whatever that means — is cockney rhyming slang for “coat.” So it seems possible that “Pop Goes the Weasel” actually means to pawn your coat, which makes a lot a sense in the context of this verse, noted as early as 1856:

Up and down the City Road
In and out the Eagle
That’s the way the money goes
Pop! goes the weasel.

The Eagle was the name of a pub on City Road. So it seems eminently likely that the song we all sung as children is based on one about pawning your coat for booze. Better that than the black plague, I suppose.

Straight-up: I Googled “Best Wikipedia page ever” and this came up. And it’s pretty great.

From the Wikipedia: List of common misconceptions

The Wikipedia’s list of common misconceptions will blow your f—ing mind. A lot of it is stuff you might have known or otherwise suspected — like how everyone pretty much knew the earth was round by the late 15th century when Columbus proposed sailing west to get east. But unless you’ve seen the page before, there’s a lot on there that’s going to be brand new to you. The whole thing’s worth a read, and since it’s presented in list form it’s already formatted for easy consumption, but here are some highlights:

– Vikings probably did not wear horns on their helmets. That comes from Wagner’s Ring cycle.

– Iron maidens did not exist as torture devices in the Middle Ages, meaning Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is historically inaccurate. They were reconstructed from various artifacts to “create spectacular objects for commercial exhibition.”

– Pilgrims did not dress like Pilgrims.

– Marie Antoinette never said, “Let them eat cake.” Rousseau did, and it was, “Let them eat brioche” anyway.

– George Washington did not have wooden dentures. They were made of gold, hippopotamus ivory, lead, and a combination of real human and animal teeth. Turns out George Washington had a baller-ass grill.

– The U.S. Constitution is not written on hemp, Cheech.

– Napoleon Bonaparte was 5’7″, slightly taller than the average Frenchman of his time.

– John F. Kennedy’s German quote “Ich ben ein Berliner” does not actually translate to “I am a jelly donut” in Berlin, it means exactly what he meant it to mean: I am a Berliner. The pastry in question is called a Berliner Pfannkuchen elsewhere in Germany, but in Berlin they just call it a Pfannkuchen, naturally.

– Undercover cops do not actually have to tell you if they’re undercover cops. Sorry if I’m blowing up your spot, undercover cops.

– Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet and the word “crap” does not derive from his name. Or perhaps both are true and the Crapper family are now vigilant Wikipedia editors.

– Old and Middle English speaking peoples did not actually pronounce “ye” instead of “the.” It just looks that way in print.

– The Great Wall of China is not visible from the moon, nor is any other specific human-made object.

– Per the Wikipedia, “the notion that goldfish have a memory span of just a few seconds is false.” I always struggled believing that one anyway. How in hell did anyone know?

– Despite what you may have seen on the Flintstones, humans and dinosaurs never co-existed. Only 59% of U.S. adults know that. 59 percent.

– Humans do not use only 10 percent of their brains. Another one of those goldfish ones. Who really purported to know that for sure?

– Lightning strikes the same place all the time. Work someplace where you can see the Empire State Building in a thunderstorm and you learn this real quick.

– Speaking of: A penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building would not pick up enough speed to kill someone. Also, it’d hit a lower level on its way down.

– This is not a common misconception, but apparently Marilu Henner can remember every meal she has ever eaten.

– Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet. He said he “took the initiative in creating the Internet,” which is kind of true.

Can’t even remember where I started, but this is where I wound up.

From the Wikipedia: List of Phobias.

The suffix -phobia, in psychiatry, is used to construct a word meaning a crippling, irrational fear of something. In common usage, it just means a strong dislike or hatred of something. The Wikipedia separates its list of phobias into five categories: Psychological phobias, non-psychological phobias, biological phobias, prejudices, and fictional phobias. Obviously a lot of the psychological phobias are serious conditions that we’ve all heard of, so I’ll skip most of them.

I don’t mean to make light of anyone’s mental-health condition, but several of the other psychological phobias seem eminently reasonable. For example: Algophobia, the fear of pain; atychiophobia, the fear of failure; hoplophobia, the fear of weapons or firearms; and necrophobia, the fear of death. Probably all of those seem rather tragic in their extreme forms, but certainly we all stand to benefit a bit from fearing pain, firearms, failure and death.

Other phobias seem alarmingly specific, like omphalophobia, the fear of belly buttons, and papaphobia, the fear of the Pope. The big difference between papaphobia and omphalophobia is that you kind of have to go out of your way to see the Pope, so if you fear him you’re pretty much in the clear unless you happen to live in the Vatican — a very awful place to be a papaphobe. But if you’re an omphalophobe and you were born of woman you’re more or less screwed.

Some terrifying-sounding self-perpetuating meta-phobias include chronophobia, the fear of time moving forward, panphobia, the fear of everything, and phobophobia, the fear of having a phobia.

Also of note is nomophobia, the fear of being out of mobile phone contact. C’mon, guy. Do you not remember, like, 1999?

Few of the biological phobias are interesting and all of the prejudices are just, you know, bigotry. Some of the fictional phobias are pretty funny but most aren’t as creative as you’d hope. Keanuphobia is exactly what it sounds like. Luposlipaphobia, coined by Gary Larson — perhaps the first person I ever recognized as funny — refers to the “fear of being pursued by timber wolves around a kitchen table while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor.”

This comes from the new-to-me but now defunct Tumblr Best of Wikipedia.

From the Wikipedia: Tool use by animals.

The Wikipedia provides a few definitions of tools, but presumably you know what tools are. Basically, they’re anything you use to do something that you can’t do with your own body. For a long time, people assumed we were the only species of animal that used tools because we always think we’re so fancy with our glue guns and our Segways. But it turns out a bunch of animals use tools too.

Most tool use by animals is by primates, which shouldn’t surprise anyone because monkeys are awesome. Most primate tools are just sticks, but they’re really making those sticks work for them. Gorillas use sticks to extract termites from nests and to gauge depth in water. Orangutans use sticks to dig delicious seeds out of fruit. Chimps use sticks a bit more violently; they use them to break open bee hives for honey and have even been seen sharpening sticks to use as spears for hunting. That’s pretty ominous, actually.

Also kind of terrifying: Bottlenose dolphins use conch shells as a kind of utensil, catching small fish in them and then lifting them out of the water to let the fish slide down into their mouths. That on its own isn’t scary, what’s scary is that the behavior appears to be spreading, implying that dolphins are still getting better at stuff. Dolphins were the even-money favorite for next dominant species on earth to begin with; learning that they’re learning only improves their odds.

Bears apparently use rocks to exfoliate, which explains why bears have such radiant skin. Also, dingos have been witnessed moving a table to help them reach food. One time I put a biscuit down on the ground and showed it to my dog. He got all excited, because he loved biscuits. Then I put a red plastic Solo cup face down on top of the biscuit to cover it. He approached the cup, sniffed it a little bit, then walked away looking dejected. I gave him the biscuit anyway, out of pity. Stupid dog.

A certain species of ant picks up small stones and other objects and drops them down rival anthills to trap the enemy ants inside and allow its compatriots to forage without competition. More like inhumantity, amirite?

Perhaps the most interesting use of tools come from birds, previously assumed to be really dumb by this site and others. It turns out crows and seagulls have been known to drop hard-shelled nuts and clams onto roads, wait for cars to run them over, then come back to eat the meaty insides.

Nothing tops this, though: Crows like this one have been seen (as you will see) breaking up bread into little pieces and dropping them into water to bait fish. This is so awesome:

I brought my bike to the city a few weeks ago and I’ve been riding around a good deal. It’s awesome. I really can’t say enough for bicycling as an inexpensive means of transportation and exercise. You can cover so much ground relatively quickly, and in New York City especially you can speed over massive suspension bridges, take in awesome views and escape to odd parts of the five boroughs with different landscapes and distinct cultures and all sorts of new things to see.

From the Wikipedia: Roosevelt Island

Roosevelt Island is a small place with a huge Wikipedia page. It doesn’t say this on the page, but Roosevelt Island is the weirdest. It’s two miles long and 800 feet wide and sits in the shadow of Manhattan in the East River. While riding there a few days ago, I saw a pizza delivery guy and wondered if he was the only pizza delivery guy working on Roosevelt Island at that time. It turns out only 9,500 people live on the island, so it seems a reasonably safe bet that there’s only one active pizza-delivery guy at any given time. What happens if 10 people happen to order pizza delivery at the same time? You’ll have to be patient, I guess. The only dude is busy right now. Or — or! — you can just go pick it up, because how far can you possibly be from the pizzeria if you live on Roosevelt Island?

The island was purchased in 1637 by Dutch governor Wouter Van Twiller from the Canarsie Indians. At that point, it was known as “Hog Island,” which is crazy intriguing. Were there lots of wild hogs there? The Wikipedia doesn’t say. But if Roosevelt Island is conducive to hog breeding we should probably get on that. Or at least open up a destination barbecue joint there called “Hog Island.”

When the English ousted the Dutch from the area, the island was seized by Captain John Manning and renamed Manning’s Island for about 20 years until Manning gave it to his son-in-law Robert Blackwell, who called it Blackwell’s Island. In 1921, it was renamed Welfare Island. Then in 1973, a few years after it had been leased by a development corporation, it was renamed Roosevelt Island, presumably because it was hard to convince people to rent apartments on Welfare Island.

In the 19th century, the island was primarily used to isolate all the distasteful elements of urban life, kind of the Danny DeVito in Twins to Manhattan’s Arnold Schwarzenegger. The city built a penitentiary on the island in 1832, then a lunatic asylum in 1839, then a smallpox hospital in 1856. These attractions drew some of the island’s most famous visitors. Anarchist Emma Goldman, corrupt mayor Boss Tweed, jazz legend Billie Holliday and actress Mae West all spent time in jail there. Nellie Bly and Charles Dickens both visited and wrote about the lunatic asylum.

Before 1909, you could only travel to the island by ship or by swimming. When the Queensboro Bridge opened, so too did a trolley that took passengers from Manhattan and Queens to the center of the bridge, where they could take an elevator down to the island. The trolley and elevator were closed in 1955 with the opening of the Welfare Island Bridge to Queens.

In 1976, Roosevelt Island got one of its most recognizable features: The tramway that lets residents take an amusement-park to work in Manhattan. The tramway was supposed to be temporary, but everyone must have realized how awesome it was and decided to leave it there. You may recognize the tramway from the first Tobey Maguire Spiderman movie, or the 1983 Sylvester Stallone film Nighthawks, or City Slickers, or The Professional, or a 2005 episode of CSI: New York or a 2010 episode of America’s Next Top Model or a 2012 episode of White Collar, or from the King Kong Tramway ride at Universal Studios, Florida. Like I said, Roosevelt Island has a very extensive Wikipedia page.

You can also get to Roorsevelt Island by the F train, but c’mon. Lame.

The first residential development on Roosevelt Island, on the north part of the island, is called Northtown. The most recent development, on the south part of the island, is called Southtown. In 2007, Southtown got a Starbucks and a Duane Reade. You can read all about the latest happenings in Roosevelt Island in the Main Street WIRE, a bi-weekly newspaper dedicated to Roosevelt Island matters that is delivered to every residence on the island and that receives a suspicious amount of coverage on the Roosevelt Island Wikipedia page.

I’m already 750 words deep and nowhere near done recapping the page, so here are some other facts about Roosevelt Island worth knowing:

• A remnant of the lunatic asylum — the Octagon — and the ruins of the smallpox hospital are still standing and worth checking out if you’re riding your bike around Roosevelt Island. But good luck figuring out how to get there.
• The island’s waste is collected and compacted by an automated vacuum collection system, the only such system serving a residential complex in the United States.
• The Wikipedia claims that Sarah Jessica Parker lived there, but it lacks a citation. But former U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan and “Grandpa” Al Lewis of The Munsters definitely lived there.
• In 1939, the New York Cubans of the Negro National League played their home games on the island. There are a bunch of athletic fields still there now and they make for some pretty epic settings, what with the river and the skyline and all.
• Outside shots of the smallpox hospital in ruins are used to depict the Foot Clan’s secret hideout in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.
• Development of the island was based on the “new communities” proposed in Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs. Though the island is technically part of the borough of Manhattan, its government and infrastructure are operated by state-created public-benefit corporation. Police on the island are, as far as I can tell, state officers and not members of the NYPD proper.