The Matterhorn at Disneyland contains a basketball goal. Near the top of the mountain is a small preparation room used by the “mountaineers” who are sometimes seen scaling the exterior. The climbers installed a hoop and backboard so they could pass the time during bad weather.

The Matterhorn space is too cramped for a full game — for that you’ll need to visit the Supreme Court.

The London Post says a wager came off, the terms of which were as follows. I will bet any man one hundred pounds, that he cannot make a million strokes, with pen and ink, within a month. They were not to be mere dots or scratches, but fair down strokes, such as form the child’s first lesson in writing. A gentleman accepted the challenge. The month allowed was the lunar month of only twenty-eight days; so that for the completion of the undertaking, an average of thirty-six thousand strokes a day was required. This, at sixty a minute, or three thousand six hundred an hour–and neither the human intellect nor the human hand can be expected to do more–would call for ten hours’ labor in every four and twenty. With a proper feeling of the respect due to the Sabbath, he determined to abstain from his work on the Sundays. By this determination he diminished by four days the period allowed him, and at the same time, by so doing, he increased the daily average of his strokes to upwards of forty-one thousand. On the first day he executed about fifty thousand strokes; on the second, nearly as many. But at length, after many days, the hand became stiff and weary, the wrist swollen, and it required the almost constant attendance of some assiduous relation or friend, to besprinkle it, without interrupting its progress over the paper, with a lotion calculated to relieve and invigorate it. On the twenty-third day, the million strokes, and some thousands over, were accomplished; and the piles of paper that exhibited them testified, that to the courageous heart, the willing hand and the energetic mind, hardly anything is impossible.

— Francis Channing Woodworth, American Miscellany of Entertaining Knowledge, 1852

On March 1, 1934, a scientist at New Hampshire’s already-odd Mount Washington observatory was digging in the snow before a garage when he was shocked to see that the holes he had dug “were promptly filled with deep blue light.”

Investigating, the man confirmed that the light could not be a “reflection from the sky or of bacteria collecting on the snow.” But no explanation was ever found, and no blue light has been reported since.

(Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 1934)

Sailing in the Gulf of California aboard H.M.S. Fly around 1838, Capt. George Hope looked down through waters “perfectly calm and transparent” and saw something new. Or, perhaps, old. From The Zoologist, 1849:

[H]e saw at the bottom a large marine animal, with the head and general figure of the alligator, except that the neck was much longer, and that instead of legs the creature had four large flappers, somewhat like those of turtles, the anterior pair being larger than the posterior: the creature was distinctly visible, and all its movements could be observed with ease: it appeared to be pursuing its prey at the bottom of the sea: its movements were somewhat serpentine, and an appearance of annulations or ring-like divisions of the body was distinctly perceptible.

“Captain Hope made this relation in company, and as a matter of conversation,” writes Edward Newman. “When I heard it from the gentleman to whom it was narrated, I inquired whether Captain Hope was acquainted with those remarkable fossil animals, Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri, the supposed forms of which so nearly correspond with what he describes as having seen alive, and I cannot find that he had heard of them; the alligator being the only animal he mentioned as bearing a partial similarity to the creature in question.”

A correspondent of the Drawer is involved in domestic perplexities. He writes:

‘I got acquainted with a young widow, who lived with her step-daughter in the same house. I married the widow; my father fell, shortly after it, in love with the step-daughter of my wife, and married her. My wife became the mother-in-law and also the daughter-in-law of my own father; my wife’s step-daughter is my step-mother, and I am the step-father of my mother-in-law. My stepmother, who is the step-daughter of my wife, has a boy: he is naturally my step-brother, because he is the son of my father and of my step-mother; but because he is the son of my wife’s step-daughter so is my wife the grandmother of the little boy, and I am the grandfather of my step-brother. My wife has also a boy: my step-mother is consequently the step-sister of my boy, and is also his grandmother, because he is the child of her step-son; and my father is the brother-in-law of my son, because he has got his step-sister for a wife. I am the brother of my own son, who is the son of my step-mother; I am the brother-in-law of my mother, my wife is the aunt of her own son, my son is the grandson of my father, and I am my own grandfather.’

— Harper’s Magazine, April 1865

One of the magistrates in Harbour Grace, in Newfoundland, had an old dog of the regular web-footed species peculiar to this island, who was in the habit of carrying a lantern before his master at night, as steadily as the most attentive servant could do, stopping short when his master made a stop, and proceeding when he saw him disposed to follow. If his master was absent from home, on the lantern being fixed to his mouth, and the command given, ‘Go fetch thy master,’ he would immediately set off, and proceed directly to the town, which lay at the distance of more than a mile from the place of his master’s residence: he would then stop at the door of every house which he knew his master was in the habit of frequenting, and laying down his lantern, growl and strike the door, making all the noise in his power until it was opened; if his master was not there, he would proceed farther in the same manner, until he had found him. If he had accompanied him only once into a house, this was sufficient to induce him to take that house in his round.

— The Scrap Book, Or, A Selection of Interesting and Authentic Anecdotes, 1825

John Raymond Godley (1920-2006), Lord Kilbracken, was a respected writer and journalist, but he’s remembered mostly for a peculiar talent: He dreamed the winners of horse races.

• While an undergraduate at Oxford in 1946, he dreamed he was reading racing results in a newspaper. Two of the winners were Bindal and Juladin, horses he knew from his waking life. In the morning he discovered that both would be running that afternoon. He bet on both, and both won.
• A month later, vacationing in Ireland, he awoke with the name Tubermore in his mind. He called the local postmistress the following day, and she told him that a Tuberose was running that day. He won, at odds of 100 to 6.
• In July he dreamed that a bookie’s clerk told him a horse named Monumentor had won a race. He found in the morning that a Mentores would be running that day. He bet and won.
• In June 1947 he dreamed he was watching one race in which he recognized jockey Edgar Britt, then watched a second race won by a horse called The Bogie. He woke to find that Britt was riding that day, and that a horse called The Brogue would be running in the race that followed. This time he sealed his picks in a time-stamped envelope in the presence of witnesses. Both horses won.
• In 1949 he dreamed he read the name Timocrat in the Mirror‘s racing sheet. He discovered that Timocrat was running the next day; he bet and won.

And so on. He couldn’t summon the dreams, of course, and the horses he picked didn’t invariably win. But even nine years later a dream led him to the winner of the Grand National. “I can offer no explanation, rational or irrational,” he wrote in a memoir. “Make your own deductions, but accept my facts as true.”

To the Editor of the Herald:

I am anxious to find out the way to figure the temperature from centigrade to Fahrenheit and vice versa. In other words, I want to know, whenever I see the temperature designated on the centigrade thermometer, how to find out what it would be on Fahrenheit’s thermometer.

Old Philadelphia Lady
Paris, December 24, 1899

That’s reasonable enough, right? It ran in the Paris Herald on Dec. 27, 1899.

The curious thing is that it also ran on Dec. 28, and Dec. 29 … and every day thereafter for 18 years, a total of 6,718 times.

Publisher James Gordon Bennett never gave a reason — he only told colleague James B. Townsend that “just so long as there was an average income of jocose but more often indignant and abusive letters about this letter at the Paris Herald office he would continue to publish it.”

There were married at Durham, Canada East, an old lady and gentleman, involving the following interesting connections:–

The old gentleman is married to his daughter’s husband’s mother-in-law, and his daughter’s husband’s wife’s mother. And yet she is not his daughter’s mother; but she is his grandchildren’s grandmother, and his wife’s grandchildren are his daughter’s step-children. Consequently the old lady is united in the bonds of holy matrimony and conjugal affection to her daughter’s brother-in-law’s father-in-law, and her great-grandchildren’s grandmother’s step-father; so that her son-in-law may say to his children, Your grandmother is married to my father-in-law, and yet he is not your grandfather; but he is your grandmother’s son-in-law’s wife’s father. This gentleman married his son-in-law’s father-in-law’s wife, and he is bound to support and protect her for life. His wife is his son-in-law’s children’s grandmother, and his son-in-law’s grandchildren’s great-grandmother.

— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious from the Harvest-fields of Literature, 1875