The five most expensive items sold on eBay (as of 2002):
An anonymous seller from Brazil once offered a decommissioned aircraft carrier. There were no takers.
The average Fortune 500 CEO is 6 feet tall — 3 inches taller than the average American man.
Of the 43 U.S. presidents, only five have been more than an inch below average height.
The 2004 tsunami arrives in Thailand. Its total energy equaled about 5 megatons of TNT, more than twice the total explosive energy used in all of World War II, including the two atomic bombs.
Geographically extreme McDonald’s franchises:
The lowest McDonald’s, 1,299 feet below sea level, is in the Israeli village of Ein Bokek, near the Dead Sea.
Many people consider this the worst poem ever written in the English language — “A Tragedy,” by the Belgian Pre-Raphaelite poet Theophilus Marzials. It was published in 1874, in his collection The Gallery of Pigeons:
Death!
Plop.
The barges down in the river flop.
Flop, plop.
Above, beneath.
From the slimy branches the grey drips drop,
As they scraggle black on the thin grey sky,
Where the black cloud rack-hackles drizzle and fly
To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop
On the black scrag piles, where the loose cords plop,
As the raw wind whines in the thin tree-top.
Plop, plop.
And scudding by
The boatmen call out hoy! and hey!
All is running water and sky,
And my head shrieks — “Stop,”
And my heart shrieks — “Die.”
* * * * *
My thought is running out of my head;
My love is running out of my heart,
My soul runs after, and leaves me as dead,
For my life runs after to catch them — and fled
They all are every one! — and I stand, and start,
At the water that oozes up, plop and plop,
On the barges that flop
And dizzy me dead.
I might reel and drop.
Plop.
Dead.
And the shrill wind whines in the thin tree-top
Flop, plop.
* * * * *
A curse on him.
Ugh! yet I knew — I knew —
If a woman is false can a friend be true?
It was only a lie from beginning to end —
My Devil — My “Friend”
I had trusted the whole of my living to!
Ugh; and I knew!
Ugh!
So what do I care,
And my head is empty as air —
I can do,
I can dare,
(Plop, plop
The barges flop
Drip drop.)
I can dare! I can dare!
And let myself all run away with my head
And stop.
Drop.
Dead.
Plop, flop.
Plop.
Reportedly Marzials once loudly asked a hushed library, “Am I not the darling of the British Museum Reading Room?” The response is not recorded.
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
“A sense of obligation.”
— Stephen Crane
Firefighter John McColgan “just happened to be in the right place at the right time” to take this photo on Aug. 6, 2000, while fighting a 100,000-acre blaze in Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest.
He was standing on a bridge over the East Fork of the Bitterroot River, and shot the photo with a Kodak DC280 digital camera.
The elk were gathering at the river, he says. “They know where to go, where their safe zones are. A lot of wildlife did get driven down there to the river. There were some bighorn sheep there. A small deer was standing right underneath me, under the bridge.”
The Tower of London is pretty crowded even when it’s empty. Reportedly it’s haunted by the ghosts of the following people:
There’s also a troupe of ghosts who re-enact the execution of Margaret Pole, the Eighth Countess of Salisbury, as well as phantom troops and a lady in mourning who has no face. Sounds like a lively time.
oporopolist
n. a fruit seller
Willie Sutton did not rob banks “because that’s where the money is.”
He never said that–he credits it to “some enterprising reporter who apparently felt a need to fill out his copy.”
Why did he rob banks? “Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I’d be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that’s all.”
In any case, Sutton certainly knew what he was doing. Between the late 1920s and his final arrest in 1952, he robbed 100 banks of $2 million.
He would bring a gun, but he prided himself on never using it. “You can’t rob a bank on charm and personality,” he said.