Two and Two

In 1977, a gravely ill 19-month-old Qatari girl was flown to a London hospital, where her condition continued to worsen, baffling her doctors.

On the sixth day, the observing nurse was startled to see that the girl began to lose her hair. She realized that the patient’s symptoms were strikingly similar to those in Agatha Christie’s novel The Pale Horse, which she had been reading.

In Christie’s novel, the murder victims had been killed by thallium poisoning. Tests confirmed elevated levels of thallium in the girl’s urine, and doctors treated her accordingly. Three weeks later she was well enough to go home.

| Literature · Oddities

Nice Kitty

http://books.google.com/books?id=orMGAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&rview=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

French sculptor Louis Vidal was blind since youth, but he produced startlingly faithful renderings of animals: a bull, a wounded stag, a horse, a cow, a dog.

With domestic creatures he could do this by feeling their anatomy directly, or by referring to skeletons or to stuffed specimens. But how did he create The Roaring Lion, the masterpiece first shown at the Salon in 1868?

Legend has it that he did it the hard way: by running his hands over a live lion at the Jardin des Plantes.

“Convinced he would not succeed without having recourse to the living ‘king of beasts,'” reported The English Illustrated Magazine in 1900, “he entered the cage without the least hesitation, accompanied by the lion-tamer. The animal allowed itself to be caressed for some time, and Vidal was thus enabled to study its anatomy. As a result, he produced that most wonderful example of his art, ‘The Roaring Lion.'”

If that’s just a story … then how did he manage it?

| Art · Oddities

Tempus Edax Rerum

Visiting Rome in The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain reflects on “the unsubstantial, unlasting character of fame.” He imagines how the people of 5868 A.D. will remember Ulysses S. Grant:

URIAH S. (or Z.) GRAUNT — popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A.D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a contemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about A.D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote ‘Rock me to Sleep, Mother.’

“These thoughts sadden me. I will to bed.”

| History · Literature

Stumper

Laid up in the hospital, James Thurber passed the time doing crossword puzzles.

One day he asked a nurse, “What seven-letter word has three u’s in it?”

She said, “I don’t know, but it must be unusual.”

| Language · Literature

Light Infantry

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Military_goat.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Since 1844, the Royal Welch Fusiliers have had a regimental goat. He’s not a mascot, but a ranking member of the unit — he marches at the head of the battalion during ceremonial duties, and fusiliers must stand to attention when he walks past.

They’re not always model soldiers. The most recent goat — Lance Corporal William Windsor, inevitably known as Billy — was once demoted for butting a drummer at the queen’s birthday celebration. But he was promoted again three months later, after taking the summer “to reflect on his behavior.” Boys will be boys.

See Reviewing the Troops.

| Oddities

Hello?

From the examination of William Henry Preece, electrician to the British General Post Office, before the House of Commons’ select committee on lighting by electricity, May 2, 1879:

Q: … Do you consider that the telephone will be an instrument of the future which will be largely adopted by the public?

A: I think not.

Q: It will not take the same position in this country as it has already done in America?

A: I fancy that the descriptions we get of its use in America are a little exaggerated; but there are conditions in America which necessitate the use of instruments of this kind more there than here. Here we have a superabundance of messengers, errand boys, and things of that kind.

| Technology