British statesman Charles James Fox managed to have two aunts who died 171 years apart:
Fox’s grandfather married twice — once at 27 and once at 76. A baby produced by the first marriage died in 1655, and a son produced by the second marriage married a woman whose sister died in 1826.
Fox himself died in 1806, but his widow survived until 1842 — nearly 200 years after the death of her aunt-by-marriage.
Malta is criss-crossed with ruts like these. No one knows who made them, when, or why. If they’re cart ruts, why are some 60 centimeters deep? If it’s an irrigation system or some kind of astronomical undertaking, what was its purpose?
The most popular theory is that ancient sledges hauled limestone to build local temples. But why then do some ruts lead straight into the sea?
London faced a surreal emergency on Oct. 17, 1814, when a giant beer vat ruptured in a St. Giles brewery. The resulting wave collapsed the neighboring vats, and 323,000 golden gallons poured into the West End.
“All at once, I found myself borne onward with great velocity by a torrent, which burst upon me so suddenly as almost to deprive me of breath,” wrote a correspondent to the London Knickerbocker. “A roar, as of falling buildings at a distance, and suffocating fumes, were in my ears and nostrils.”
The flood filled neighboring basements and causing several tenements to collapse. In all, eight people were killed — “by drowning, injury, poisoning by porter fumes, or drunkenness.”
American disasters are sweeter but less stimulating.
Between 1834 and 1874, proud New Englander James Johns published the Vermont Autograph and Remarker, an irregular collection of history, essays, verse, and fiction. It was irregular because Johns wrote each issue in pen, in a beautifully lucid newspaper font with no erasures. Johns bought a small hand press in 1857 but rarely used it — he found he was actually faster with the quill.
In January 1890, a tremendous blizzard struck the Sierra Nevada, paralyzing a Southern Pacific Railroad train and trapping its 600 passengers in their cars for three weeks. On Jan. 31 one of them, George T. McCully, began publishing a newspaper, the Snowbound, “issued every week-day afternoon by S. P. Prisoner in Car No. 36, blockaded at Reno, Nevada.” We know that McCully offered to sell copies of the hand-penciled four-page daily for 25 cents each; it’s not clear whether he got past the first issue. Perhaps he ran out of paper.
This walking hero [Daniel Crisp] on Sept. 21, 1802, walked one mile in seven minutes and fifty seconds, on the City-road, London.—July 16, 1817, commenced walking backwards forty miles daily for seven days, and completed 280 miles by that retrograde motion, on Wormwood Scrubs, near London, one hour and a quarter within the given time, to the surprise of thousands who witnessed the performance. … April 23, 1818, commenced walking from London to Oxford, to and fro by way of Datchet, Windsor, and Henley, the distance of sixty-one miles daily for seventeen successive days, and completed the 1037 miles on the 9th of May at eight minutes after eleven at night, being fifty-two minutes within the given time; during the performance of this arduous undertaking it rained heavily for ten days, which caused the Thames to overflow on the road to the depth of two feet and a half, and a quarter of a mile in length, which he was obliged to walk through for five days.
— Pierce Egan, Sporting Anecdotes, Original and Selected, 1822
The Tri-State Tornado of 1925 traveled 200 miles through the American Midwest, killing nearly 700 people.
Along the way, it drove a 1×5-inch board through a 2×6-inch plank.
If you’re a woman and want to humiliate a man, invite him to watch you do this:
Now challenge him to do the same. If he’s like most men he’ll get stuck on step 6. The common explanation is that men’s hips are built differently; they also have proportionally bigger feet. Either way, you can easily pick his pocket while he’s struggling there.
Canadian cats have their own parliament. In the same precinct of Ottawa where the human legislature meets, Irène Desormeaux erected a feline equivalent in the 1970s. The cats are all spayed or neutered, they get free inoculations and medical care, and the whole thing is run by volunteers using personal donations.
Mark Lindsey had just graduated from the Virginia Tech architecture school in 1982 when his firm was asked to design an addition to the football stadium at VT’s rival, the University of Virginia.
“There was a V-shaped opening at the end of the stadium,” he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “And I had a late-night inspiration that the best thing to put in this V-shaped opening was a T.”
To everyone’s surprise, UVA bought it, and Bryant Hall opened in 1985. In fact, though the VT logo was clearly visible from the air, UVA officials didn’t notice it until it was pointed out. They replaced the building in 1999.
“It’s been a great little story to tell at parties,” Lindsey said.
1816 is known as “the year without a summer” — the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora flung huge amounts of volcanic dust into the atmosphere, dropping temperatures worldwide and giving the sky a sallow cast that’s visible in Turner’s landscapes of the period (above).
It was a great calamity for farmers, but a boon for horror literature — the “wet, ungenial summer” forced Mary Shelley and John Polidori indoors on their Swiss holiday, where they wrote both Frankenstein and The Vampyre.
