Remember when you were a teen with GREAT ideas that turned out to be terrible in retrospect?

In 1965, Colin Irwin, a 19 year-old from Bournemouth, England, suddenly decided he wanted to live in a steel tank weighed down with sections of railway line at the bottom of the sea for a week.

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Getting a sense of "ah fuck it" from the Kiribatan Town Naming Committee

I recently learned about Sandy Island, in Australia's Coral Sea:

- 15 miles long, 3 miles wide

- First recorded in 1774 (Captain Cook)

- Not actually there.

It's the world's most recently undiscovered island - after at least 2 previous attempts to undiscover it failed.

Here's the story.

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Thanks to the first volume of Michael Palin's diaries, I recently discovered the glory of one of the greatest travel pieces in British publishing history.

In early April 1977, The Guardian published a 7-page travel supplement on this "little-known" island nation...

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