Choir practice normally started at 7:20 p.m. at the West Side Baptist Church in Beatrice, Neb. But on March 1, 1950, all 15 members were late.

One pair of sisters had car trouble; they called for a ride from a third member, who was delayed by homework. A mother and daughter were detained at a relative’s house. The choir director was late because her daughter, the pianist, had fallen asleep. Other members needed to finish a letter or hear the end of a radio program. One was “just plain lazy.”

So no one was there at 7:25 when the building exploded. The blast shattered local windows and forced a nearby radio station off the air.

The church furnace, it seems, had ignited a gas leak.

Back in 2005 we noted that 7’9″ M.V. Bates had married 7’5″ Anna Swan in 1871. They conceived two sons; the first was stillborn, but the second was delivered successfully in 1879, weighing 23.75 pounds. Obstetrician A.P. Beach published an account of the delivery that year in the New York Medical Record. Excerpts:

• “After a convenient time, with my patient in the usual position, I proceeded to make an examination, but was unable to reach the os uteri, it being so far up. I could not, with my hand, by any ordinary effort, make a satisfactory examination, but concluded that she was in the initial stage of labor.”
• “At 4 P.M., on the 18th, while conducting an examination during pain, the membranes gave way spontaneously and the amniotic fluid came pouring out so profusely as to startle every one. … The bed was well protected by rubber blankets, which carried the waters over the side of the bed, where they were caught in vessels to the amount of five gallons.”
• “The forceps could not be successfully applied because of the unusually large head which lay, with the neck, in a vagina that would measure on its posterior aspect 12 inches at least, and from 7 to 9 in its anterior.”
• “After further consultation, as it was our great desire to deliver if possible, without mutilation, we passed a strong bandage over the neck of the child, and while one made downward and lateral traction, the other, after several attempts, succeeded in bringing down an arm, and finally after a laborious seige we succeeded in delivering our patient of a male child.”

“We believe that this is the largest infant at birth of which there is any authenticated record,” note the editors. “The placenta usually weighs one-sixth as much as the foetus. In this case the secundines in all weighed nearly half as much as the child.”

Shizo Kanakuri disappeared while running the marathon in the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm. He was listed as a missing person in Sweden for 50 years — until a journalist found him living quietly in southern Japan.

Overcome with heat during the race, he had stopped at a garden party to drink orange juice, stayed for an hour, then took a train to a hotel and sailed home the next day, too ashamed to tell anyone he was leaving.

There’s a happy ending: In 1966 Kanakuri accepted an invitation to return to Stockholm and complete his run. His final time was 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 8 hours, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds — surely a record that will last forever.

From The World of Wonders, 1883:

“There was a widow [Anne] and her daughter [Jane], and a man [George] and his son [Henry]. The widow married the son, and the daughter married the father. The widow was therefore mother [in law] to her husband’s father, and grandmother to her own husband. By this husband she had a son [David], to whom she was also great-grandmother. Now, the son of a great-grandmother must be grandfather or grand-uncle to the person to whom his mother was great-grandmother; but Anne was great-grandmother to him [David]. Therefore David is his own grandfather.”

Hood’s Magazine (1846) adds, “This was the case with a boy at a school at Norwich.”

In 1891, Sybell Corbet took this photograph in the library of Combermere Abbey in Cheshire. The abbey’s owner, Lord Combermere, had just died after a London accident and was being buried that day in the family vault a few miles away.

Members of the family felt the figure in the chair was very like the dead man. But physicist William Barrett, noting that it was distinct only from the waist up, suggested that perhaps a manservant had sat down briefly during the 15 minutes that Corbet had left the shutter open.

Barrett had just published an article with these particulars in the Westminster Gazette when he received a letter from a Combermere relative. She shared his doubts, she said, but wanted to correct one error in the article. “You say he had not lost his legs,” she wrote, “but he died from an accident in which they were so much injured, he could never have used them again. He was run over by a wagon at Knightsbridge, crossing the street, and only lived a few weeks.”

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.

— Zhuangzi, Chinese text, fourth century B.C.

In 1776 an unfortunate woman was found sheltering under a haystack in Bourton, near Bristol. By day she would seek charity from the local people, but at night she would always return to the haystack, saying only that “trouble and misery dwelt in houses.”

Curiously, she appeared well bred and accustomed to good society. Hannah More, who took up her cause, found her “handsome, young, interesting, enough Mistress of her reason carefully to shut up from our observation every avenue that might lead to her secret.”

More published “A Tale of Real Woe” in the St. James’s Chronicle in 1785, offering what little she had been able to learn about the woman: “that her Father was a German, her Mother an Italian; that she has one brother and one Sister; that her father had a very fine garden full of olive and orange Trees.”

Rumors abounded that “Louisa” was an illegitimate daughter of Francis I, emperor of Austria, and thus a half-sister to Marie Antoinette, but these have never been substantiated. Whoever she was, the woman spent the next 16 years in a succession of hospitals, never giving her identity, and when she died in 1801, she took her secret with her.