According to a popular story, a resident of Mechelen, Belgium, emerged unsteadily from an inn one foggy night in 1687, looked up at St. Rumbold’s Cathedral, and raised an alarm — the tower was on fire.

Residents flung open their windows and saw the same reddish glow. The rumor raised an uproar, and the mayor organized a chain of volunteers to pass buckets of water up the tower stairway.

Before they reached the top, though, the fog cleared and the alarm was called off. The red glow had been only the moon’s light shining through the tower’s red bell windows.

Ever since, residents of Mechelen have been known as Maneblussers, or moon extinguishers.

On May 19, 1914, G. Howell Parr of Baltimore lay down and rolled three continuous miles to win a bet of $1,000. Details, from the New York Times:

Wagered $1,000 he could roll three miles.
Made the time limit June 1.
Started at 8 o’clock last night from the Elk Ridge Kennels.
Finished at 11:10 A M. to-day at Charles Street and University Parkway.
Rolled fifteen hours and ten minutes, with intermissions for rest.
Covered approximately 15,840 feet, or about three miles.
Took about four feet to a roll.
Made about 3,960 rolls.
Won the $1,000.
Every time he rolled he won about 25 cents.

He wore football gear and turned with every fourth revolution into a pillowed chair positioned by his friends, where he’d rest for 30 seconds. “At times the wife approached him solicitously and asked how he felt. He always looked up at her, and smiled and said: ‘Feel fine.'”

Indeed, he felt well enough afterward to go to the racetrack, “where several of his horses were on the day’s programme.” “When asked where he felt the strain of the rolling most, he said, ‘At my wrists; I put so much weight on them.'”

An optical illusion. These circles are concentric.

(Baingio Pinna and Richard L. Gregory, “Shifts of Edges and Deformations of Patterns,” Perception 31:12 [December 2002], 1503-1508.)

If I take a single glance at a speckled hen, I know that I’ve seen many speckles, but I can’t say how many I’ve seen. I have immediate experience of a determinate fact, but the experience doesn’t provide certain knowledge of the fact.

“[O]ur difficulty is not that there must be characteristics of the many-speckled datum which pass unnoticed,” writes philosopher Roderick Chisholm. “[I]t is, more seriously, the fact that we are unable to make a reliable judgment about what we do notice.”

“The problem is significant, since every possible solution appears to involve serious consequences for the theory of empirical knowledge.”

(Roderick Chisholm, “The Problem of the Speckled Hen,” Mind 51:204 [October 1942], 368-373.)

Before 1963, hungry squirrels in Longview, Washington, had to leave their park and run across Olympia Way to collect nuts near a local office building. After seeing many of them killed, resident Amos Peters built a dedicated 60-foot bridge above the road.

It’s now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 1784, in the margin of a math notebook, English schoolboy Richard Beale drew a chicken wearing trousers.

The Museum of English Rural Life tweeted the find after acquiring 41 Beale family diaries in 2016. Program manager Adam Koszary told the Guardian, “When you see a 13-year-old from the 18th century doing the kind of doodles that kids are doing today, it is so relatable — there’s an instant connection. Also, there’s the fact it’s just so stupid.”

A (probably!) unrelated chicken in trousers. Homework doodles from 13th-century Russia.

In 1614, William Nealson, a trader in Japan for the British East India Company, wrote to his friend Richard Wickham. The first half of the letter is sensible enough, and Nealson notes that his associate Mr. Cocks has already written to Wickham, “wherein he hath informed you of all business, so as for me to write thereof should be but a tedious iteration.” But then he writes “Now to the purpose” and seems to go mad:

Concerning our domestic affairs, we live well and contentedly, and believe me, if you were here, I could think we were and should be a happy company, without strife or brawling. Of late I caught a great cold for want of bedstaves, but I have taken order for falling into the like inconveniences. For first, to recover my former health, I forgot not, fasting, a pot of blue burning ale with a fiery flaming toast and after (for recreation’s sake) provided a long staff with a pike in the end of it to jump over joined stools with. Hem.

Notwithstanding I may sing honononera, for my trade is quite decayed. Before I had sale for my nails faster than I could make them, but now they lie on my hand. For my shoes none will sell, because long lying abed in the morning saves shoe leather, and driving of great nails puts my small nails quite out of request, yea, even with my best customer; so that where every day he had wont to buy his dozen nails in the morning, I can scarcely get his custom once in two or three. Well this world will mend one day, but beware the grey mare eat not the grinding stone. I have had two satirical letters about this matter from Mr. Peacock, which pleased him as little as me, but I think he is so paid home at his own weapon as he will take better heed how he carp without cause. It was not more to me, but broader to Mr. Cocks. I know the parties which I speak of you would gladly know; for your satisfaction herein I cannot make you know mine, because I think you never see her; but I think God made her a woman and I a W. For the other, it is such a one as hardly or no I know you would not dream of. But yet for exposition of this riddle, construe this: all is not cuckolds that wear horns. Read this reversed, Ab dextro ad sinistro. O I G N I T A M. What, man! what is the matter? methinks you make crosses. For never muse on the matter; it is true. I am now grown poetical.

He that hath a high horse may get a great fall;
And he that hath a deaf boy, loud may he call;
And he that hath a fair wife, sore may he dread
That he get other folks’ brats to foster and to feed.

Is this code? Nealson closes by warning “Be not a blab of your tongue” and urges Wickham to destroy “whatever I write you of henceforward.” Are these inside jokes, or references to forgotten poems or songs? William Foster includes the letter without comment in his collection of correspondence received by the company. I haven’t been able to learn anything more about Nealson, or about this seeming oddity. I found it in Giles Milton’s Nathaniel’s Nutmeg (2012).