From The Strand, August 1909:

“This is a photograph, taken by myself last year, of an old London horse omnibus that I found on the prairie on the outskirts of the City of Calgary, Alberta, Western Canada. It had been stripped of its outside seats, and bore such announcements as: ‘Over Waterloo Bridge,’ ‘Camden Town,’ ‘Old Kent Road,’ ‘The Dun Cow,’ etc. It still bore the name of the original owner, a Mr. French, of London. I have come across many discarded London omnibuses in out-of-the-way villages, etc., in this country, but I never expected to find one six thousand miles away from the Metropolis. — Mr. Henry Pope, 437, Fulham Palace Road, London, S.W.”

The National Weather Service issued a worrisome advisory on Dec. 17, 2003:

Unusually hot weather has entered the region for December … as the Earth has left its orbit and is hurtling towards the sun. Unusually hot weather will occur for at least the next several days as the Earth draws ever nearer to the sun. Therefore, an excessive heat watch has been posted.

The alert, which appeared on NOAA’s website, turned out to be a test message posted accidentally during a training session. By midafternoon it had been removed and a correction posted.

In December 2005, tired of endless credit-card offers, West Hollywood realtor Gary More scrawled NEVER WASTE A TREE across one application and mailed it in.

Chase Visa issued a card to “Never Waste Tree.”

He cut it up.

More notable errors in the New York Times:

• “A report misidentified the document on which John Hancock put his famous prominent signature. It was the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.” (July 14, 1985)
• “An article about Ivana Trump and her spending habits misstated the number of bras she buys. It is two dozen black, two dozen beige and two dozen white, not two thousand of each.” (Oct. 22, 2000)
• “A recipe for juniper-flavored gravlax misstated the amount of kosher salt. It is one-half cup, not four cups.” (Nov. 26, 2000)
• “A report in the ‘Sunday’ pages included erroneous data from the Farmer’s Almanac about occurrences of full moons. The last month with no full moon was February 1980, not February 1866. The next month without a full moon will be February 1999, not some month 2.5 million years from now.” (Feb. 25, 1996)
• “An article misstated the title of the 1955 film that made James Dean a star. It is ‘Rebel Without a Cause,’ not ‘Rebel With a Cause.'” (May 8, 2000)

See also Erratum.

Writing in Psychological Review in 1917, Berkeley psychologist George Stratton reported the startling achievements of Jewish scholars known as Shass Pollaks, who would memorize the entire Babylonian Talmud — not just the text, but the position of every word on every page:

“A pin would be placed on a word, let us say, the fourth word in line eight; the memory sharp would then be asked what word is in the same spot on page thirty-eight or fifty or any other page; the pin would be pressed through the volume until it reached page thirty eight or page fifty or any other page designated; the memory sharp would then mention the word and it was found invariably correct. He had visualized in his brain the whole Talmud; in other words, the pages of the Talmud were photographed on his brain. It was one of the most stupendous feats of memory I have ever witnessed and there was no fake about it.”

Stratton also quotes Judge Mayer Sulzberger of Philadelphia, who had seen a Shass Pollak put down a pencil at random in the Talmud and immediately name the word on which it had lighted.

These achievements, Stratton wrote, “should be stored among the data long and still richly gathering for the study of extraordinary feats of memory.”

Ben Greenblatt, popular piano stylist, has played for every kind of society party, but this week marked the first time that his audience consisted of monkeys. He ‘gave’ at the Philadelphia Zoological Gardens just to see how the chimpanzees would react to his Steinway. …

Checking upon the reaction of animals to music has been tried periodically ever since the zoo opened its gates 70 years ago. Once an elephant nearly sprayed a jazz band with a trunkful of water, and on another occasional Tommy Dorsey nearly lost his trombone when an inquisitive chimpanzee tried to take it apart to see what made it tick.

— Billboard, April 1, 1944

Every year, thousands of tourists pass through Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, and many collect sand or rocks as souvenirs. And every year, thousands of people mail them back, reporting mysterious misfortunes:

• “Please return to soil. I have been having bad luck.”
• “Ever since we have taken items, we have had nothing but back luck and medical problems. We apologize for taking items, so we are returning same to Hawaii.”
• “We placed the rock last fall on a cast iron chair in our garden, this spring the chair’s leg had fallen off. This is the least of the problems we have had since we have taken the rock.”
• “I must be cursed! Please, whatever the legend, curse or folklore is, please put these rocks back on a beach for me. I do not want one more stroke of fate to push me over the edge.”

According to legend, the volcano goddess Pele punishes those who steal from her. Timothy Murray took home some sand in 1997, and his pet died, his fiancee left him, he started to drink, and the FBI arrested him in a copyright infringement case. “One minute you’re working and you’re law-abiding and you’ve got money in the bank,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “The next minute you are sitting in a federal penitentiary in Miami.”

“People need something to blame their troubles on,” says local postmaster Dave Kell, who notes that much of what is sent back is not even from Hawaii. “They bring this stuff on themselves.”

What does he know? If the fire goddess is oppressing you, mail your guilty rock to this return service and they’ll wrap it in a ti leaf and return it to Pele with a propitiating orchid. Better safe than sorry.

Cincinnati has a subway. Or, rather, the abortive beginnings of one. The digging began in 1920, when streetcars couldn’t keep up with the city’s growing population. But cost overruns and the advent of the automobile gradually turned it into a white elephant. In all, seven miles were prepared, but no cars were ever ordered.

In the years since 1925, when construction stopped, the empty tunnel has been proposed for use as an air-raid shelter, a storage area, a mall, a film set, a wind tunnel, and a wine cellar, but none of these received approval. Instead the entrances have been sealed with concrete, and it remains simply the nation’s largest abandoned subway tunnel.

If enough time passes, perhaps it will be forgotten entirely. Intriguingly, this has happened before.