Baseball players who died on their birthdays:
- Bucky Harris, 81
- Gabby Hartnett, 72
- Bob Moose, 29
- Joe Tinker, 68
Author: Greg Ross
Balloon Mail
Besieged by Prussians in 1870, Paris found a clever way to get mail to the outside world. For 20 centimes you could write a letter on a thin piece of green paper; these were collected and sent hopefully upward on unguided mail balloons. Each 4-gram postcard carried an address; the Parisians hoped that the balloons would drift to earth somewhere and that whoever found the messages would forward them.
It worked. During the four-month siege they sent up 65 balloons, and only two went missing.
Valentino’s Real Name
Rudolph Valentino’s real name was Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Piero Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antoguolla.
A Spaceborne Time Capsule
You can write a message to future generations at the KEO project. It’ll be launched on a satellite that won’t return to Earth for 50,000 years.
Even more ambitious is the LAGEOS satellite, which will re-enter our atmosphere in 8.4 million years bearing a plaque that shows the arrangement of the continents. Let’s hope our descendants still have catcher’s mitts.
Unquote
“By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.” — Socrates
Uncorker of Ocean Bottles
In the 16th century, the English navy would put messages in bottles to send information ashore about enemy positions.
Queen Elizabeth I even created the official position “Uncorker of Ocean Bottles.” Anyone else caught opening them faced the death penalty.
Misfortunes Never Come Singly
Making toast at the fireside,
Nurse fell in the grate and died;
And, what makes it ten times worse,
All the toast was burned with Nurse.
— Col. D. Streamer
In a Word
spatchcock
v. to insert into a text too hurriedly
“The Eye of Africa”
Early space missions that passed over the featureless Sahara were surprised to see a 30-mile eye staring up at them. No one’s quite sure what it is. It’s too flat to be a crater or a volcano. If it’s simply an uplift laid bare by erosion, why is it so nearly circular? For now they’re just calling it the Richat Structure.
People Who Have Been Cremated
People who have been cremated:
- Neville Chamberlain
- Wyatt Earp
- Albert Einstein
- W.C. Fields
- Sigmund Freud
- Greta Garbo
- Adolf Hitler
- Henry James
- John Maynard Keynes
- Rudyard Kipling
- Timothy Leary
- Nelson Rockefeller
- Carl Sagan
- Dr. Seuss
- George Bernard Shaw
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- John Steinbeck