Any person in want of a DEAD PIG may find one, that will probably answer his purpose, in the middle of Broadway, between Broome and Spring Streets. Applicants need not be in any great haste, as it is expected that he will lie there several days; and if the warm weather should last, and the carriages will let him alone, he will grow — bigger and bigger.
— New York Daily Advertiser, 1822
What’s unusual about this 1649 engraving by Claude Mellan, Sudarium of Saint Veronica?
The image is produced by one continuous spiraling line starting at the tip of Jesus’ nose.
Letter to the Times, May 2, 1940:
Sir,
In view of the publicity you have accorded to Mrs Barrow’s letter, I hope that you will spare me space to say, as an advocate for the consumption of grass-mowings, that I have eaten them regularly for over three years, and off many lawns. The sample I am eating at present comes off a golf green on Mitcham Common. I have never suffered from urticaria or any of the symptoms Mrs Barrow mentions. Nor did any of the many of my horses to which I have fed grass-mowings, freshly cut and cleaned from stones, &c. For my own consumption I also wash them well.
Yours faithfully,
J.R.B. Branson
When a magnitude 6.8 earthquake shook Olympia, Wash., in 2001, shop owner Jason Ward discovered that a sand-tracing pendulum had recorded the vibrations in the image above.
Seismologists say that the “flower” at the center reflects the higher-frequency waves that arrived first; the outer, larger-amplitude oscillations record the lower-frequency waves that arrived later.
“You never think about an earthquake as being artistic — it’s violent and destructive,” Norman MacLeod, president of Gaelic Wolf Consulting in Port Townsend, told ABC News. “But in the middle of all that chaos, this fine, delicate artwork was created.”
“Lamb says somewhere that if, of three friends (A, B, and C), A should die, then B loses not only A but ‘A’s part in C,’ while C loses not only A but ‘A’s part in B.’ In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out.” — C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 1960
Is this woman spinning clockwise or counterclockwise?
drogulus
n. an entity whose presence is unverifiable because it has no physical effects
A.J. Ayer coined this word spontaneously while describing his “principle of verification” during a 1949 broadcast:
Suppose I say, ‘There’s a drogulus over there’ and you say … ‘What’s a drogulus?’ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I can’t describe what a drogulus is, because it is not the sort of thing you can see or touch. It has no physical effects of any kind, but it’s a disembodied being.’ And you say, ‘Well, how am I to tell if it’s there or not?’ and I say, ‘There’s no way of telling. Everything’s just the same if it’s there or it’s not there. But the fact is it’s there. There’s a drogulus there standing just behind you.’ Does that make sense?
“Talk about obscure words!” writes lexicographer Norman Schur. “Have we finally met the man who wasn’t there?”
As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish, I wish he’d stay away.
— Hughes Mearns
Curiously, Ayer himself seems to have confirmed at least one sighting. In 1959, Lionel Penrose wrote in New Biology, “I had difficulty in finding a suitable name for the activated complexes produced in [certain] experiments. On showing one of them to Professor A. J. Ayer, I inquired whether it perhaps might be a ‘drogulus’ … He replied that it was undoubtedly a ‘drogulus’.”
Letter to the New York Times, March 26, 1911:
Dear Mr. Editer
i Went down town with my daddy yesterday to see that terrible fire where all the littel girls jumped out of high windows My littel cousin Beatrice and i are sending you five dollars a piece from our savings bank to help them out of trubble please give it to the right one to use it for sombody whose littel girl jumped out of a window i wouldent like to jump out of a high window myself.
Yours Truly,
Morris Butler
Wisconsin’s Lorenzo Macauley patented this “improvement in road-lanterns” in 1879, presumably after testing it himself.
A lantern thus attached to a horse’s head enables both horse and driver to see the condition of the track and the objects in it much more plainly and at greater distance than when a lantern is placed on the carriage.
Fair enough.
