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
Author: Greg Ross
Bitterroot Blaze
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.”
Boo Again!
The Tower of London is pretty crowded even when it’s empty. Reportedly it’s haunted by the ghosts of the following people:
- Thomas Becket
- King Edward V
- Richard, Duke of York
- Anne Boleyn (headless)
- Lady Jane Grey
- Sir Walter Raleigh
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.
In a Word
oporopolist
n. a fruit seller
Willie Sutton
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.
“Halfway to Hell”
One “smoot” is five feet seven inches, or about 1.7 meters.
It’s named for Oliver R. Smoot, an ill-starred MIT pledge whose fraternity brothers rolled him head over heels to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge in October 1958.
The bridge measured “364.4 smoots plus one ear.” The markings are repainted each year by the incoming pledge class of Lambda Chi Alpha.
Ironically, Smoot later became chairman of the American National Standards Institute.
Season to Taste
A will, handwritten in a book of kitchen recipes by Margaret Nothe, a Philadelphia housewife, in 1913:
Chili Sauce Without Working
4 quarts of ripe tomatoes
4 small onions
4 green peppers
2 teacups of sugar
2 quarts of cider vinegar
2 ounces ground allspice
2 ounces cloves
2 ounces cinnamon
12 teaspoons saltChop tomatoes, onions and peppers fine, add the rest mixed together and bottle cold. Measure tomatoes when peeled. In case I die before my husband I leave everything to him.
A Pennsylvania probate court found it valid.
Society of Mind
Urville is a city of 14 million inhabitants that exists entirely in the mind of Gilles Trehin, a French autistic savant.
Trehin began creating plans at the age of 12, using Lego blocks and model airplanes. Today, at 33, he has drawn extensive maps and landscapes of his creation, as well as inventing a culture and a detailed history going back to the 12th century B.C., when he imagines the city was founded by the Phoenicians.
Today, in Trehin’s mind, Urville is the third largest city in the developed world, behind Tokyo and New York, and boasts 87 cinemas, 42 cabarets, 174 public swimming pools and European offices of I.B.M., Sony, Citybank, Olivetti, and Siemens.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge,” wrote Albert Einstein. “Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
Po’ Poe
A desperate letter from Edgar Allan Poe to his Philadelphia publishers, Aug. 13, 1841:
Gentlemen, — I wish to publish a new collection of my prose Tales with some such title as this —
“The Prose Tales of Edgar A. Poe, Including ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ The ‘Descent into the Maelstrom,’ and all his later pieces, with a second edition of the ‘Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.'”
The “later pieces” will be eight in number, making the entire collection thirty-three — which would occupy two thick novel volumes.
I am anxious that your firm should continue to be my publishers, and, if you would be willing to bring out the book, I should be glad to accept the terms which you allowed me before — that is — you receive all profits, and allow me twenty copies for distribution to friends.
They turned him down in three days flat. A century later, at a 1944 auction, the letter itself fetched $3,000.
What’s in a Name?
“Liver-Eating Johnson” had the coolest nickname in the Old West — cooler, perhaps, than the truth warranted.
The “mountain man” was actually born in New Jersey around 1824. He deserted the Navy after the Mexican-American War and lit out for Wyoming, where he trapped, hunted and supplied cordwood to steamboats.
The legend starts in 1847, when the Crow tribe killed his Indian wife and he launched a personal war that lasted 20 years, in which, supposedly, he would cut out and eat the liver of each man he killed.
Did he really? Who knows? But it made a good story, and Johnson’s stature began to grow — literally and figuratively. His Civil War records put him at less than 6 feet tall, but local yarns soon said he was 6 foot 6.
After serving the Union Army as a sharpshooter, he spent the 1880s as a deputy sheriff in Leadville, Colo., and a town marshal in Red Lodge, Mont. He died in 1900.
But a century later the nickname was still working. The 1972 Robert Redford film Jeremiah Johnson was based in part on his life — and Redford even served as one of the pallbearers when Johnson’s body was reburied in Cody, Wyo., in 1974.