Changing a Bulb

On March 19, 1886, over Oshkosh, Wis., the sun went out.

“The day was light, though cloudy, when suddenly darkness commenced settling down, and in five minutes it was as dark as midnight,” reported the Monthly Weather Review. “General consternation prevailed; people on the streets rushed to and fro; teams dashed along, and women and children ran in cellars; all business operations ceased until lights could be lighted. Not a breath of air was stirring on the surface of the earth. The darkness lasted from eight to ten minutes, when it passed off, seemingly from west to east, and brightness followed. … It seemed to be a wave of total darkness passing along without wind.”

No one knows the cause, but essentially the same thing had happened a century earlier.

| Oddities

Waterproof

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Le_d%C3%A9luge_-_mus%C3%A9e_de_beaux_arts_de_Nantes_20091017.jpg

In The City of God, Augustine raises a curious question: How did Methuselah survive the flood? According to the Septuagint, the patriarch was 355 years old when Noah was born, and the deluge occurred 600 years later. Thus Methuselah was 955 at the flood–yet he lived to be 969. He was not aboard the ark, and the deluge destroyed the rest of humanity. How did Methuselah survive?

“This is a celebrated question,” wrote Jerome, “and one which has been publicly aired in argument by all the churches.” It’s largely obviated today: Most modern editions of Genesis are translated from the Masoretic text, which has Methuselah dying in the year of the flood.

| Religion

An Arm and a Leg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BenTurpinBeachGals.jpg

Body parts insured by Lloyd’s of London:

  • Betty Grable’s legs ($250,000)
  • Jimmy Durante’s nose ($140,000)
  • Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes ($1 million)
  • Fred Astaire’s feet ($650,000)
  • Bruce Springsteen’s voice ($7 million)
  • Keith Richards’ hand (£1 million)
  • Michael Flatley’s legs (£25 million)

Silent-film comedian Ben Turpin, above, even insured his eyes against uncrossing.

| Entertainment

Love’s Labour’s Lost

The diary of Elizabethan lawyer John Manningham reveals a Bugs-Bunny-like episode from the life of William Shakespeare. When Richard Burbidge was playing Richard III, a female audience member “greue soe farr in liking wth him” that she asked him to visit her that evening using the name Richard III. Shakespeare overheard this, beat Burbidge to the lady’s house and “was intertained.” When word came that Richard III was at the door, Manningham says, Shakespeare sent the reply that “William the Conqueror came before Richard III.”

Is it true? Who cares?

| Literature

Speaking in Tongues

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giuseppe-Caspar-Mezzofanti.jpg

Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti (1774-1849) was keeper of the Vatican library and later a cardinal, but he’s best remembered for being a hyperpolyglot, a speaker of many languages.

How many? Estimates range from 24 (in 1805) to 114 (judged after his death). The true number probably lies somewhere in between, but it’s considerable–Byron called Mezzofanti “a monster of languages, the Briareus of parts of speech.”

A Russian traveler once asked Mezzofanti for a list of the dialects he had mastered, and the cardinal sent him the name of God in 56 languages. And Gregory XVI once arranged to have a polyglot group of students waylay him in the Vatican gardens: “[O]n a sudden, at a given signal, these youths grouped themselves for a moment on their knees before his Holiness, and then, quickly rising, addressed themselves to Mezzofanti, each in his own tongue, with such an abundance of words and such a volubility of tone, that, in the jargon of dialects, it was almost impossible to hear, much less to understand, them. But Mezzofanti did not shrink from the conflict. With the promptness and address which were peculiar to him, he took them up singly, and replied to each in his own language, with such spirit and elegance as to amaze them all.”

For another prodigious librarian, see Book Lover.

| Oddities

Noted

There are four occasions on which remarkable masses of ice, of many hundred pounds in weight, are believed to have fallen in India. One near Seringapatam, in the end of last century, said to have been the size of an elephant. It took three days to melt. We have no further particulars, but there is no reason whatever for our doubting the fact.

— George Buist, “Remarkable Hailstorms in India, From March 1851 to May 1855,” in Report of the Twenty-Fifth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1856

| Oddities

Proceed With Caution

Welsh cyclists were confused in 2006 to discover a temporary sign at the Barons Court roundabout between Penarth and Cardiff:

CYCLISTS
DISMOUNT

LLID Y BLEDREN
DYMCHWELYD

The first part is fine … but llid y bledren is Welsh for “inflammation of the bladder.”

“Road signs are mistranslated on an enormously regular basis, usually because people use online translators,” Aran Jones of the Welsh language group Cymuned told the South Wales Echo. But even using a human translator doesn’t guarantee a good result. In Swansea, a sign posted in October 2008 read:

NO ENTRY FOR HEAVY GOODS VEHICLES. RESIDENTIAL SITE ONLY.

NID WYF YN Y SWYDDFA AR HYN O BRYD. ANFONWCH UNRHYW WAITH I’W GYFIETHU.

The latter phrase means “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.”

(Thanks, Tom.)

| Language

Shooting Gallery

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=FyhiAAAAEBAJ

Hunting blinds, 1897-1991. Are these the ingredients of the perfect crime? You could dress up as a cow and shoot your rich Uncle Oswald, then stand there and chew your cud as the police searched for clues.

Perhaps someone’s already done this.

| Technology