Binary Arts devised this wonderful three-dimensional illusion for the third Gathering for Gardner in 1998.

You can download a dragon of your own here.

On the first of December, 1787, some fishermen fishing in the river Thames, near Poplar, with much difficulty drew into their boat a shark, yet alive, but apparently very sickly; it was taken on shore, and, being opened, in its belly were found a silver watch, a metal chain, and a cornelian seal, together with several pieces of gold-lace, supposed to have belonged to some young gentleman, who was unfortunate enough to have fallen overboard; but that the body and other parts had either been digested, or otherwise voided; but the watch and gold-lace not being able to pass through it, the fish had thereby become sickly, and would in all probability very soon have died. The watch had the name of ‘Henry Watson, London, No. 1369,’ and the works were very much impaired. On these circumstances being made public, Mr. Henry Watson, watchmaker, in Soreditch, recollected that about two years ago he sold the watch to Mr. Ephraim Thompson, of Whitechapel, as a present to his son, on going out his first voyage, on board the ship Polly, Capt. Vane, bound to Coast and Bay: about three leagues off Falmouth, by a sudden heel of the vessel, during a squall, Master Thompson fell overboard, and was no more seen.–The news of his being drowned soon after came to knowledge of his friends, who little thought of hearing any more concerning him.

— The Kaleidoscope, Jan. 22, 1822

See The Shark Arm Affair.

Charles Dickens slept with his head pointing north. “He maintained that he could not sleep with it in any other position,” noted journalist Eliza Lynn Linton.

Ben Jonson was buried upright in Westminster Abbey — it’s not clear whether this was his request or required by circumstance.

And in 1800 Maj. Peter Labelliere was buried on Box Hill head down, declaring that as “the world was turned topsy-turvy, it was fit that he should be so buried that he might be right at last.”

By the levee of the Missouri River in Fort Benton, Mont., stands a bronze statue of a vigilant sheepdog. It commemorates Shep, a dog who appeared at the town’s Great Northern Railway Station one day in August 1936 while workers were loading a casket onto a train. The dog watched the train depart, then turned and trotted off down the tracks.

Thereafter, for five and a half years, Shep would appear on the platform to meet four trains a day, scanning the passengers who alighted and then retiring under the platform. His master still had not returned when in January 1942 he slipped on the rails and disappeared under an engine.

A cynic might wonder how much of this story is tied up in Montana tourism. But plausible it certainly is: Essentially the same thing had happened 12 years earlier in Japan.

From The Strand Magazine, August 1909:

The above photographs show front and side views of a fancy dress representing ‘Half-an’-‘Arf’. The costume was prepared in three evenings during spare time, and the dress suit was in no way altered or damaged, all the tramp-side garments being superstructed. There is a nine days’ beard on one side of the face, the hair being combed with isinglass to make it stand up. The face and arm are stained and made up with powders to look exactly like a natural tramp’s complexion minus the dirt. The boot is an old hand-sewn one, made up with painted and stained brown paper, with a hole in front from which a piece of tow protruded. The whole costume cost about a shilling to produce, and was a great success at more than one dance.

Room 308 of the Samudra Beach Hotel in West Java is reserved for the Indonesian goddess Nyai Loro Kidul.

The hotel stands near the cliff from which folktales say a young girl flung herself and became Queen of the South Sea. While praying beneath a nearby ketapang tree in the early 1960s, President Sukarno received the message that a hotel might be built on the spot if a room were reserved for the jealous sea goddess.

The room is decorated in green, her favorite color.

The year 1818 was a kind of Annus Mirabilis. The amount of all the figures together was eighteen, which was also the sum expressed by the first two, as well as the last two, and also reckoned singly, either forwards or backwards: an arithmetical combination which can never happen again.

— The Nic-Nac; or, Oracle of Knowledge, May 24, 1823

In 2007, hunters caught a 50-ton bowhead whale off the coast of Alaska. Lodged in its neck they found a fragment of a bomb lance that had been manufactured in New Bedford, Mass., in 1890.

This means the whale was 115 to 130 years old. It might have been born in the same year that Rutherford B. Hayes was sworn in as president.

In 1938, a wallet manufacturer in Lockport, N.Y., decided to include sample Social Security cards in its products. The company’s vice president thought it would be clever to use the actual Social Security number of his secretary, Hilda Whitcher.

It wasn’t. The sample card was half-size, printed in red, and bore the word SPECIMEN in large letters, but by 1943 more than 5,000 people were using Whitcher’s number as their own. The Social Security Administration voided the card and started a publicity campaign to educate users, but over the years more than 40,000 people reported the number as their own, some as recently as 1977.

“They started using the number,” Whitcher marveled. “They thought it was their own. I can’t understand how people can be so stupid. I can’t understand that.”