These four stories, spread across three decades, are a reminder that the improbable has a habit of becoming historical fact, often through methods nobody planned and infrastructure nobody expected to matter.
Nepal elected a Prime Minister through Discord in 2025. Not a bespoke government portal, not a solemn chamber vote. Discord. The one with the gaming servers and the emojis.
The vote elevated Sushila Karki, former Supreme Court Chief Justice, to interim Prime Minister. Whether this is a marvel of pragmatic adaptation or simply a very efficient summary of how strange modern governance has become is, perhaps, both.
The Faroe Islands Do the Impossible
If the Discord vote is the freshest story in today’s episode, the most purely joyful belongs to 12 September 1990, when the Faroe Islands, a nation of 47,000 people, played their first competitive international football match and beat Austria 1-0.
Their goalkeeper was a fisherman. Austria had been to World Cups. The Faroes had been playing organised international football for approximately five minutes.
It remains one of the most extraordinary upsets in the sport’s history. If the image of a fisherman keeping a clean sheet against a proper footballing nation does not produce at least a small involuntary smile, I am genuinely uncertain what to do with you.
The Lawn, the Cessna, and the Asteroid
On the same date in 1994, Frank Corder flew a stolen Cessna into the White House south lawn in the early hours of the morning. President Clinton was not in residence at the time; he had been staying elsewhere during renovations. The incident triggered a fundamental reassessment of White House security protocols, which is one way to leave a mark on a building.
And in 2005, Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft arrived at asteroid Itokawa after two years of travel. The asteroid is, officially, potato-shaped: the correct description, as it turns out. Hayabusa eventually returned samples to Earth in 2010, and those samples revealed Itokawa to be a rubble pile asteroid, a loosely held collection of rock and debris rather than a solid body. The findings advanced our understanding of asteroids and contributed to planetary defence research.
Four Improbable Things on One Date
A gaming platform in a Himalayan parliament, a fisherman in goal, a small aircraft on a Washington lawn, and a spacecraft visiting a potato-shaped rock 300 million kilometres from home. Twelve September, it turns out, has a genuine gift for the improbable.
The full ten-minute episode is waiting. It is worth your time.