Low Tech

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/877451

This is inspiring: In 2005 the National Toy Hall of Fame inducted the cardboard box.

“I think every adult has had that disillusioning experience of picking what they think is a wonderful toy for a child, and then finding the kid playing with the box,” said chief curator Christopher Bensch. “It’s that empty box full of possibilities that the kids can sense and the adults don’t always see.”

In the same spirit, the museum honors alphabet blocks, rocking horses, teddy bears, and jump rope alongside Monopoly, Etch A Sketch, and other registered trademarks.

Among the 44 toys in the hall of fame, the most sophisticated is the Nintendo Game Boy. The simplest, charmingly, is “the stick.”

| Society · Technology

International Relations

Indeed this tendency to shift the responsibility for the disease on others by giving it their name, appears all through the early references to it. The Italians called it the Spanish or the French disease; the French called it the Italian disease; the English called it the French disease; the Russians called it the Polish disease; the Turks called it the French disease; the Indians and the Japanese called it the Portuguese disease. And, as we shall see, the first Spaniards who recognized the disease called it the disease of Española, which meant at that time the disease of Haiti.

— W.A. Pusey, “The Beginning of Syphilis,” Journal of the American Medical Association, June 12, 1915

| Society

Huth’s Moving Star

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/172339

In late 1801, Johann Bode, director of the Berlin Observatory, received a curious series of letters from astronomer Hofrath Huth in Frankfort-on-the-Oder. On Dec. 2 Huth had seen something new in the sky, “a star with faint reddish light, round, and admitting of being magnified.” But it wasn’t a star: On subsequent nights he watched it drift slowly to the southwest, growing gradually fainter, and by Jan. 6 it had disappeared. Huth concluded that he was watching an object recede from Earth.

Unfortunately, Bode was busy with other things, and the weather was too cloudy for him to confirm Huth’s observations. Also, the positional data that Huth had provided were somewhat poor.

Huth wasn’t a nut: Among other things, he co-discovered Comet Encke in 1805. And Nature noted later that he had alerted Bode to the object in time for the director to witness it himself if the skies had been clear. But as it happened, Huth was the only one to witness the curious object, whatever it was. And, whatever it was, it has not returned.

| Oddities · Science & Math

Bent Lines

Slips of the tongue are often made on the stage, even by the most prominent actors and actresses. Mrs. Langtry at one performance said to her stage lover, ‘Let us retire and seek a nosey cook.’

An actor at the Queen’s Theatre, Manchester, turned ‘Stand back, my lord, and let the coffin pass’ into, ‘Stand back, my lord, and let the parson cough.’ …

A well-known actor who has often been applauded by New York theater-goers, in one of his speeches intended to say, ‘Royal bold Caesar,’ but forgot himself in his excitement and said, ‘Boiled rolled Caesar, I present thee with my sword.’

— John De Morgan, In Lighter Vein, 1907

| Entertainment · Language

Nagwear

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=mbg6AAAAEBAJ

Plain and slouchy? You need a pair of posture earrings, patented by Peter Badovinac in 1972.

Each earring contains a small ball in a horizontal chamber. If you’re sitting up straight, the ball rests at the rear end of the chamber. If your “posture becomes slumped,” the ball rolls to the front, “thus giving a sharp clicking sound so to warn the wearer to hold her head erect.”

“Much simpler and easier to use for maintaining and attaining good posture than the old bothersome method of carrying a heavy book upon the person’s head.”

| Technology

The Pudding Guy

In 1999, UC-Davis civil engineer David Phillips was grocery shopping when he noticed something peculiar. Healthy Choice Foods was offering frequent-flyer miles to customers who bought its products. But a 25-cent pudding would bring 100 miles — the reward was worth more than the product itself.

Recognizing a good thing, Phillips bought 12,150 servings of pudding for $3,140, claiming he was stocking up for Y2K. Then he enlisted the Salvation Army to help him peel off the UPC codes, in exchange for donating the pudding.

He mailed his submission to Healthy Choice, and to their credit they awarded him 1.25 million frequent-flyer miles, enough for 31 round trips to Europe, 42 to Hawaii, 21 to Australia, or 50 anywhere in the United States.

There’s no downside. Phillips also got Aadvantage Gold status for life with American Airlines, which brings a special reservations number, priority boarding, upgrades, and bonus miles. And he got an $815 tax writeoff for donating the pudding.

(Thanks, Brendan.)

| Oddities

Overtime

Line items in a bill received by an English lord from an artist in 1865, for repairs and retouchings to a gallery of paintings:

  • To filling up the chink in the Red Sea and repairing the damages of Pharaoh’s host.
  • To cleaning six of the Apostles and adding an entirely new Judas Iscariot.
  • To a pair of new hands for Daniel in the lions’ den and a set of teeth for the lioness.
  • To an alteration in the Belief, mending the Commandments, and making a new Lord’s Prayer.
  • To new varnishing Moses’s rod.
  • To repairing Nebuchadnezzar’s beard.
  • To mending the pitcher of Rebecca.
  • To a pair of ears for Balaam and a new tongue for the ass.
  • To planting a new city in the land of Nod.

From William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892.

| Oddities

Heated Basement

While drilling for natural gas near the Turkmen village of Derweze in 1971, geologists watched their rig fall through the surface into a huge underground cavern.

The opening was full of gas, so they ignited it, hoping it would burn off in a few days.

That was 39 years ago. Presumably it will still burn out eventually, but the locals have given up waiting — they now call it “the door to hell.”

See A Hot Town.

| Oddities

Knee Service

In 1978, Baptist minister Hans Mullikin arrived at the White House after crawling 1,600 miles from Marshall, Texas.

An aide told him that President Carter was too busy to see him.

“I just wanted to show America that we need to get on our knees and repent,” Mullikin told reporters. “This is something I had in my heart and wanted to do for my country.”

He added, “A lot of people tell me I’m crazy.”

| Religion