Sears used to sell houses by mail. Between 1908 and 1940, about 75,000 American families bought kits that included everything necessary to construct a finished house, including nails, screws, shingles, windows, staircases, mantelpieces, and paint. All this would be delivered to the local railroad station, and the customer would assemble it with the help of friends (or, later, local contractors).
With 447 varieties and a wealth of options — customers could choose their own hardware, light fixtures, cabinets, bookcases, and telephone niches — Sears houses have no characteristic appearance. But it’s thought that most of them are still being lived in today.
Another French trial is related of a beggar who being famished went to the door of a victualing house and inhaled the smell of the dinner until refreshed. He was sued by the proprietor for the price of a dinner. He declared he had taken nothing but the plaintiff declared that he had been refreshed at his expense. The justice gave this case a study that might well be imitated by our superior judges and finally decided that as the defendant had been refreshed by the smell of the dinner, the proprietor ought to be compensated by hearing the jingle of the coins.
— H.C. Shurtleff, “The Grotesque in Law,” American Law Review, January-February 1920
In 1955, the radio program Sergeant Preston of the Yukon promised that every child who bought a box of Quaker Oats cereal would receive a deed for one square inch of land in the Yukon. The company bought 19 acres on the Yukon River, divided it into square-inch plots, and packed the deeds into boxes of cereal.
In all 21 million plots were distributed this way, and then people, being people, began to explore the possibilities. According to Charles C. Geisler in Property and Values (2000), one deed owner declared independence for his tiny fiefdom; another offered to donate his to create the world’s smallest national park. One boy sent four toothpicks to the title office so they could fence his inch, though the deeds stipulated that each owner must acknowledge the right of every other owner to cross his plot at will. In Canadian Literary Landmarks (1984), John Robert Colombo reports that one wily collector amassed 10,000 deeds and asked to combine them; “his request was denied, as nowhere on the Deed of Land did it state that the square inches were adjacent.”
As it turned out, all this enterprise was moot — Quaker Oats never registered the subdivision or paid taxes on the land, so the whole thing reverted to the Canadian government a few years later.
When Dora Ratjen competed at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, her teammates thought it strange that she always bathed behind a locked door. “I thought something was a bit funny, because she had a deep voice and she snored in her sleep,” recalled fellow high jumper Elfriede Kaun. “She also had to shave, not just her legs and under her arms, but also her face.”
Ratjen took fourth place and went on to set a world record (1.67 m) in the 1938 European Athletics Championships. On the way home she was detained by the Magdeburg police, who discovered that she was a man. Because of his malformed genitals, the midwife at his birth had mistakenly told his parents that he was female, and he was christened Dora and raised as a girl. “From the age of 10 or 11 I started to realize I wasn’t female, but male,” he told police. “However, I never asked my parents why I had to wear women’s clothes even though I was male.” He learned to pursue his love of sport as a loner.
After the discovery in Magdeburg, Ratjen promised to stop competing, and the prosecutor declared that no finding of fraud was possible because there was no intention to reap financial reward. Dora returned his medals, changed his name to Heinrich, and quietly took over his parents’ bar, declining numerous interview requests.
It’s often reported that the Nazis forced Ratjen to compete in the Olympics as a deliberate ruse “for the honor and glory of Germany,” but a 2009 investigation by Der Spiegel found no evidence of this. Sportswriter Volker Kluge told the magazine, “On the basis of the available documents, I think it is completely out of the question that the Nazis deliberately created Dora Ratjen as a ‘secret weapon’ for the Olympic Games.” He conceded that the Reich Sport Ministry may have been aware that Ratjen was a “borderline case.”
[Lewis Carroll] told me of a simple, too simple, rule by which, he thought, one could be almost sure of making something at a horse-race. He had on various occasions noted down the fractions which represented the supposed chances of the competing horses, and had observed that the sum of these chances amounted to more than unity. Hence he inferred that, even in the case of such hard-headed men as the backers, the wish is often father to the thought; so that they are apt to overrate the chances of their favourites. His plan, therefore, was to bet against all the horses, keeping his own stake the same in each case. He did not pretend to know much about horse-racing, and I probably know even less; but I understand that it would be impossible to adjust the hedging with sufficient exactitude — in fact, to get bets of the right amount taken by the backers.
— Lionel Arthur Tollemache, Old and Odd Memories, 1908
In 1979 Louisiana congressional candidate Luther Devine Knox tried to change his name to None of the Above so that the phrase could appear on the ballot.
His hope was that voters could then vote symbolically to reject the whole slate. “The people of this country have never had a free election,” he said in 1991. “We don’t have a right to reject candidates.”
The Haskell Free Library and Opera House straddles the border between Derby Line, Vt., and Stanstead, Quebec. The library’s front door is in the United States, but the circulation desk and all of the books are in Canada. Opera is performed on a Canadian stage before an American audience.
Hence it’s the only library in the U.S. with no books, the only opera house in the U.S. with no stage, and the only library in Canada with no entrance.
Suppose in some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree, resulting in a forest fire. In the fire a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering. So far as we can see, the fawn’s intense suffering is pointless. For there does not appear to be any greater good such that the prevention of the fawn’s suffering would require either the loss of that good or the occurrence of an evil equally bad or worse. Nor does there seem to be any equally bad or worse evil so connected to the fawn’s suffering that it would have had to occur had the fawn’s suffering been prevented. Could an omnipotent, omniscient being have prevented the fawn’s apparently pointless suffering? The answer is obvious, as even the theist will insist. An omnipotent, omniscient being could have easily prevented the fawn from being horribly burned, or, given the burning, could have spared the fawn the intense suffering by quickly ending its life, rather than allowing the fawn to lie in terrible agony for several days. Since the fawn’s intense suffering was preventable and, so far as we can see, pointless, doesn’t it appear that … there do exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse?
— William L. Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16.4 (1979): 335-341.
