Showoff

In 1996, Göran Kropp rode a bicycle from his home in Sweden to Mount Everest, scaled it alone without oxygen tanks, and cycled back home.

“It is not the mountain we conquer,” wrote Edmund Hillary, “but ourselves.”

| Oddities

Unquote

“He has to retreat into his fanciful world in order to survive. Otherwise, he leads kind of a dull, miserable life. I don’t envy dogs the lives they have to live.” — Charles M. Schulz, on Snoopy

| Entertainment · Quotations

Kneebone Connected to the …

Excerpts from 19th-century students’ physiology exams:

  • “Physillogigy is to study about your bones stummick and vertebry.”
  • “Occupations which are injurious to health are cabolic acid gas which is impure blood.”
  • “We have an upper and lower skin. The lower skin moves all the time and the upper skin moves when we do.”
  • “The body is mostly composed of water and about one half is avaricious tissue.”
  • “The stomach is a small pear-shaped bone situated in the body.”
  • “The gastric juice keeps the bones from creaking.”
  • “The Chyle flows up the middle of the backbone and reaches the heart where it meets the oxygen and is purified.”
  • “The salivary glands are used to salivate the body.”
  • “In the stomach starch is changed to cane sugar and cane sugar to sugar cane.”
  • “The olfactory nerve enters the cavity of the orbit and is developed into the special sense of hearing.”
  • “The growth of a tooth begins in the back of the mouth and extends to the stomach.”
  • “If we were on a railroad track and a train was coming the train would deafen our ears so that we couldn’t see to get off the track.”

— From Mark Twain, “English as She Is Taught: Being Genuine Answers to Examination Questions in Our Public Schools,” 1887

| History · Humor

Fore!

The swinging Brassie strikes; and, having struck,
Moves on: nor all your Wit or future Luck
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Stroke,
Nor from the Card a single Seven pluck.

— From “The Golfer’s Rubaiyat” by H.W. Boynton, collected in The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II, 1907

| Humor · Poems

Watch Dogs

In 1997, retired advertising executive Dan FitzSimons proposed a new cable TV channel called The Puppy Channel: “24 hours a day, seven days a week, footage of puppies fooling around like puppies do, acting the natural comedians and cuties that they are, with no people, no talk, accompanied only by relaxing instrumental music.”

In focus group surveys, 41 percent of respondents said they would prefer watching the channel to CNBC, and 37 percent preferred it to TBS.

| Entertainment

Alexander Selkirk

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Archpielago_Juan_Fernandez_%28Vista_hacia_Robinson_Crusoe%29.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Robinson Crusoe isn’t entirely fiction — it’s based on the story of a real Scottish sailor, Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years marooned on an uninhabited island.

Selkirk was sailing with privateer William Dampier in 1703 when he began to doubt the seaworthiness of their galleon, the Cinque Ports. Finally he decided to stay ashore voluntarily on the Juan Fernández islands in the South Pacific with only a musket, gunpowder, carpenter’s tools, a knife, a Bible, and his clothing.

At first Selkirk was wracked with loneliness and regret, but he soon acclimated to island life. He domesticated wild cats to keep rats at bay, grew turnips, cabbage and pepper berries, and built two huts of pimento trees. He hunted wild goats and made clothing of their skins and forged a knife from cast-off barrel rings.

There’s a telling postscript to the story. After four years and four months, Selkirk was rescued by William Dampier, the same man who had left him ashore — but Selkirk was surprised to see he was sailing a different ship. The Cinque Ports had sunk, losing most hands. Selkirk, it seems, had been right to stay on the island.

| History · Literature