In high school, Robin Williams was voted “most likely not to succeed.”
Author: Greg Ross
United Nations
Excerpts from 112 Gripes About the French, a handbook produced to help American soldiers understand the French after the Liberation:
- The French are too damned independent. The French are independent. They are proud. They are individualists. So are we. That’s one reason there is friction between us.
- I never heard people gab so much. Gab, gab, gab. If you understood the language it might be interesting and not just “gab.” An American writer, Ambrose Bierce, said, “A bore is a person who talks — when you want him to listen.”
- The French are not as clean as the Germans. Perhaps not. If the Germans had had no soap for five years they wouldn’t be as clean as they might like to be. A learned man once said, “An untidy friend is better than an immaculate enemy.”
- The French can’t drive a car. They can’t keep it up. They ruin vehicles. The French, on the whole, certainly do not drive as well, keep a car up as well, or protect their vehicles as well as we do. Neither do women, compared to men. We have had more mechanical training, more technical experience. And at the present time we have incomparably better maintenance facilities.
A Bicycle Built for Few
Evidently somebody thought this was a good idea. In the late 19th century, lamplighters used this “giraffe bicycle” to travel between gas streetlamps. If you could keep your balance you’d be sitting more than 7 feet above the ground. Watch the road.
Play Dough
Playboy Playmate of the Month modeling payouts:
1959-1960: $500
1961-1965: $1,000
1966-1967: $2,500
1968-1969: $3,000
1970-1977: $5,000
1978-1983: $10,000
1984-1989: $15,000
1990-today: $20,000
A Double Mystery
A Navy collier during World War I, the U.S.S. Cyclops put to sea from Rio de Janeiro on Feb. 16, 1918, touched at Barbados on March 3 and 4, and was never heard from again. She took 306 crew and passengers with her.
In 1968, a diver off Norfolk, Va., reported finding the wreck of an old ship in about 300 feet of water. When shown a picture of the Cyclops he said he was convinced it was the same ship. But, strangely, even that wreck disappeared — further expeditions failed to find anything.
Moving Words
Kermit the Frog spoke at ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s funeral.
Just Do It
The Nike “swoosh” logo was created by Carolyn Davidson, a freelance graphic design student, in 1971.
She was paid $35.
The Foarest City
Cleveland is misspelled. The Ohio city was named for Gen. Moses Cleaveland, the leader of the crew that surveyed the local territory. But when the town’s first newspaper, The Cleaveland Advertiser, was established in 1831, the editor found that its title was too long by one letter — so he unceremoniously dropped an A.
In a Word
pinguitude
n. fatness
Zuiyo Maru
On April 25, 1977, the Japanese trawler Zuiyo Maru was working off the coast of New Zealand when its nets caught a foul-smelling, decomposing corpse that measured about 10 meters long and weighed two tons.
To avoid spoiling the fish catch, the captain decided to dump the carcass back into the ocean, but the crew first took some photos and measurements. The creature had a neck 1.5 meters long, four large, reddish fins, and a tail about 2 meters long, and it lacked a dorsal fin.
The story made a sensation in Japan, and the shipping company belatedly ordered all its boats back to relocate the dumped corpse, without success.
Some scientists declared the creature to be a prehistoric plesiosaur; others thought it might have been an oversized basking shark. Fujiro Yasuda of Tokyo University said, “We can’t find any known species of fish that correspond with the animal caught outside New Zealand. If it is a shark, it is a species unknown to science.” We’ll never know.