Continuing Education

In 1952, a stray cat wandered into Elysian Heights Elementary School in Echo Park, Calif. He seemed to be about 7 years old, skinny but healthy, and he was apparently determined to live at the school. The students quickly adopted him, feeding him from their sandwiches, and he made a home in classroom 8, disappearing each night but turning up again in the morning.

The sandwiches must have been pretty good, because “Room 8” stayed at the school for 15 years, reappearing mysteriously at the end of each summer vacation. Thanks to widespread media coverage, including features in Time and Look, he’s said to have received 10,000 letters in that time, which the children dutifully answered. And every year his picture was taken with the graduating class of sixth graders.

Wherever he came from, it seems he’d found what he wanted. He died in August 1968, and his pawprints grace the sidewalk in front of the school.

… Flock Together

On Friday morning of the week before last, early risers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, witnessed a peculiar sight in the shape of a shower of birds that fell from a clear sky, literally cluttering the streets of the city. There were wild ducks, catbirds, woodpeckers, and many birds of strange plumage, some of them resembling canaries, but all dead, falling in heaps along the thoroughfares, the singular phenomenon attracting many spectators and causing much comment.

The most plausible theory as to the strange windfall is that the birds were driven inland by the late storm on the Florida coast, the force of the current of air and the sudden change of temperature causing the death of many of the little feathered creatures when they reached Baton Rouge. Some idea of the extent of the shower may be gathered from the estimate that out on National Avenue alone the children of the neighborhood collected as many as 200 birds.

— St. Louis newspaper, quoted in The Osprey, December 1896

No Reunion

British statesman Charles James Fox managed to have two aunts who died 171 years apart:

http://books.google.com/books?rview=1&pg=PA98&id=MG4lAAAAMAAJ#PPA132,M1

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.

See also Proof That a Man Can Be His Own Grandfather.

Groovy

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Misrah_Ghar_il-Kbir_5.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

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?

The Great Beer Flood

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.

Strange Newspapers

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.

Footwork

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 Chair Trick

If you’re a woman and want to humiliate a man, invite him to watch you do this:

  1. Stand with your toes touching a wall.
  2. Placing one foot immediately behind the other, take two steps back.
  3. Have him place a chair between you and the wall.
  4. Bend at the waist and place the top of your head against the wall.
  5. Lift the chair.
  6. Stand erect.

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.

Rule of Paw

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

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.