In 1972, the Procrastinators Club of America sent a letter to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London, complaining that the Liberty Bell was cracked.
After an interval, the foundry responded:
“We would be happy to provide a replacement bell. Kindly return the damaged bell to us in its original packaging.”
The very worst case of delerium tremens on record is one told of by the Bonham (Texas) Enterprise, which says that a few days ago a man residing five or six miles from that place ‘saw something resembling an enormous serpent floating in a cloud that was passing over his farm. Several parties of men and boys, at work in the fields, observed the same thing, and were seriously frightened. It seemed to be as large and long as a telegraph-pole, was of a yellow striped color, and seemed to float along without any effort. They could see it coil itself up, turn over, and thrust forward its huge head as if striking at something.’
— New York Times, July 8, 1873
macropicide
n. a slayer of kangaroos
If you die in a fiery air crash, don’t blame Samuel Young. His combination pillow and crash helmet, patented in 1970, provides both comfort and safety.
“Upon being informed of the imminence of a crash landing, the passenger puts this pouch-like device over his head and ties the free ends of the strings together under his chin so that the crash helmet remains in position during the crash landing, despite the violent forces which are likely to be encountered on impact.”
H.G. Wells’ 1914 novel The World Set Free is not his best known, but it’s certainly his most prescient — he predicted nuclear weapons:
She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening, all-embracing, continuing sound. Every other light had gone out about her, and against this glare hung slanting walls, pirouetting pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly flight of huge angular sheets of glass.
The novel imagines an invention that accelerates radioactive decay, producing unthinkably powerful bombs. (Wells even dedicated the novel “to Frederick Soddy’s interpretation of radium.”)
This application was far ahead of the science of the time — physicist Leó Szilárd later said it helped inspire his own conception of a nuclear chain reaction.
If that’s not impressive enough: In Wells’ novel, allies drop an atomic bomb on Germany during a world war in the 1940s!
Dorothy Parker named her pet canary Onan, “because he spills his seed upon the ground.”
Photos of Chang Woo Gow are deceiving because of his regular proportions: The Chinese giant was already 7 foot 9 when he came to England at age 19 — he wrote his name on a wall at a height of 10 feet at the request of the Prince of Wales.
Fourteen years later, when he appeared in Paris for the 1878 World’s Fair, Chang had grown to 8 feet and weighed 364 pounds. But he met the public clamor with consistent kindness, grace, good humor, and a quiet intelligence — he spoke six languages and, on one occasion, greeted by name several visitors whom he had encountered once 16 years earlier.
After a tour of European capitals, he retired to Bournemouth, where it is said that on evening walks he would light his cigar at gas streetlamps. When he died in 1893 at age 48 (and was buried in a coffin eight and a half feet long), his friend William Day remembered him as “a giant of giants, great of stature, but with the kindest nature and a heart as true and tender as ever beat.”
If we take from the words Revolution Francaise the word veto, known as the first prerogative of Louis XIV, the remaining letters will form ‘Un Corse la finira’–A Corsican shall end it, and this may be regarded as an extraordinary coincidence, if nothing more.
— William T. Dobson, Poetical Ingenuities and Eccentricities, 1882
See Able Was I.
Yet another great truth I record in my verse,
That some Vipers are venomous, some the reverse;
A fact you may prove if you try,
By procuring two Vipers and letting them bite;
With the first you are only the worse for a fright,
But after the second you die.
— Hilaire Belloc, collected in Carolyn Wells, The Book of Humorous Verse, 1920
What is this stuff? Fragments of it can be found over large areas in the northeastern Sahara. No one’s sure where it came from — it could have arrived as part of a meteor, it could have been fused together in some ancient impact or under the heat of an aerial explosion. The jury’s still out.
