Famous Teetotalers

Famous teetotalers:

  • John Ashcroft
  • Adolf Hitler
  • Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson
  • Penn Jillette
  • Franz Kafka
  • Osama bin Laden
  • David Letterman
  • T.E. Lawrence
  • Bill O’Reilly
  • Vladimir Putin
  • Fred Rogers
  • George Bernard Shaw
  • Henry Thoreau
  • Donald Trump

Robert Benchley wrote, “Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, that it’s compounding a felony.”

| Trivia

Malden Island

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NASA-MaldenIsland.jpg

This is Malden Island, an uninhabited speck of land more than 1,500 miles from Hawaii. When Lord Byron’s cousin discovered it in 1825, he found a series of ruined stone temples in the interior, but the island was deserted. Who were the builders, where did they come from, and what became of them? No one knows for sure.

| Oddities

San Serriffe

In April 1977, as a joke, the British newspaper The Guardian published a seven-page supplement about a fictional island nation called San Serriffe. It fooled quite a few readers, which is surprising, since it’s essentially a series of bad puns about typography:

  • There are two main islands, the Upper Caisse and the Lower Caisse. The capital, Bodoni, is linked by highways to the major ports, including Port Clarendon, but Arial in the Lower Caisse has grown in importance during the personal computer era.
  • Natives are called Flong, and the descendants of colonists and known as colons. Those of mixed race are called semi-colons.
  • At independence in 1967, the country was led by General Pica, a military strongman.
  • Cultural highlights include the Ampersand String Quartet and “Times Nude Romances.”
  • The islands hold an annual endurance challenge race, known as the Two Em Dash, that now attracts international participants.

The island’s alternate name, if it needed any, is Hoaxe.

| Hoaxes

Barrett’s Classification of Demons

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vrubel_Demon.jpg

A classification of demons, from occultist Francis Barrett’s 1801 book The Magus:

  • Mammon: prince of seducers
  • Asmodai: prince of vile revenges
  • Satan: prince of witches and warlocks
  • Pithius: prince of liars and liar spirits
  • Belial: prince of fraud and injustice
  • Merihem: prince of pestilences and spirits that cause pestilences
  • Abaddon: prince of war
  • Astaroth: prince of inquisitors and accusers
| Religion

Jedi Census Phenomenon

More than 70,000 Australians declared themselves members of the Jedi in the 2001 census, thanks to a fad fueled by e-mail. So did 53,000 New Zealanders and 20,000 Canadians. In England and Wales, 390,000 people gave their religion as Jedi, making it the country’s fourth largest reported religion, behind Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism.

Ironically, the stunt led many otherwise apathetic people to take the census, so it may actually have improved its quality.

| Religion

The Platypus

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Gould_John_Duckbilled_Platypus_1845-1863.png

The Platypus

My child, the Duck-billed Platypus
A sad example sets for us:
From him we learn how Indecision
Of character provokes Derision.
This vacillating Thing, you see,
Could not decide which he would be,
Fish, Flesh or Fowl, and chose all three.
The scientists were sorely vexed
To classify him; so perplexed
Their brains, that they, with Rage at bay,
Call him a horrid name one day,–
A name that baffles, frights and shocks us,
Ornithorhynchus paradoxus.

— Oliver Herford

| Humor · Poems