So I went to the Royal Academy’s Russia exhibition yesterday, which led to me looking up oligarch/collector Petr Aven on Wikipedia. He’s Mikhail Fridman’s business partner in Alfa Group, which means ironically enough I was looking at paintings belonging to the guy whose employees built a whole fake website to confuse me about their ownership of Russian mobile operator Megafon back in 2006, but failed because I used the magic of traceroute, WHOIS, and the Firefox built-in developer console to unmask their stinking act.
Anyway, Fridman’s entry led me to this North London landmark, this related Yorkshire chemical corporation, one of their original key products, its main application, and via one of the stated alternative applications, to music, magic, its texts, their sources, and Bismarckian-era German Jewish historical scholarship that evidently had unintended consequences.
A bit like looking up Petr Aven on Wikipedia, then.